Conan O'Brien doesn't get enough credit for bringing glory back to the job of Oscar host

Dear Gossips,

Five days to go until the Oscars and Conan O’Brien, returning for the second year in a row, covers the new issue of The Hollywood Reporter. It’s a good piece about how Conan is preparing for a job, a job that he takes very seriously, even though he will no doubt at times seem very unserious when he’s doing it on Sunday. That, after all, is comedy.

And at one point in the article, Conan talks about how he was invited to a dinner party once and told, unexpectedly, that he’d have to deliver some remarks and that he’d be the last to speak. He spent the rest of the night agonising over what he might say and obviously he ended up killing but it exhausted him, which is why he so appreciated it when a woman came up to him afterwards and told him she could tell that he’d been through it. “It meant so much to me that she noticed. There’s this illusion that comics just get up and do these things.”

Conan and his team have been at it for weeks, he’s been doing surprise sets around Los Angeles after spending the day in the writers room. He and a few of the writers are testing jokes, debating what might work or not for the “industry crowd” and also for the audience watching from home. And he’s also handling the pressure of having to follow himself because he pretty much received full marks last year when he hosted the first time. That’s why they asked him to do it again two weeks later. But it’s not like Conan needs the money – he has a huge podcast deal at SiriusXM, he has his own travel show – and he doesn’t need the gravitas either, he’s already been awarded the Mark Twain Prize (and if you haven’t seen that special on Netflix, highly recommend, it’s hilarious).

Conan, truly, is doing it because he wants to, for the challenge, for the high. To satisfy his obsession with comedy and performance. To go back to the money, we all know that Oscar hosts are paid scale, right? It’s practically nothing for the amount of work that goes into it, which is why for a while there they had such a hard time finding someone. The job was thankless, and for a long time it was joyless, especially with more people chirping online. Then came Conan, who gave it such a refresh last year, who both honoured the Oscar tradition but also made the event his own. And, in the process, actually restored some prestige to the Oscar host title. He doesn’t get enough credit for this, not just for setting a performance standard, but also for bringing glory back to the job.

Click here for more of Conan in THR.