Conan O’Brien revealed a few skits he proposed for his hosting gig earlier this month at the 97th Academy Awards that were rejected due to how they presented the famous gold Oscar statue.
The late-night host avoided most hot-button topics and politics during his time onstage, but he did want to have some fun with the Oscar statue. The 61-year-old celeb said the Academy turned him down, however.
O’Brien said his idea was to portray a 9-foot-tall Oscar statue as his domestic partner, Variety reported. “We’re fighting about things couples fight about,” he said of the concept during a recent episode of the “Conan Needs a Friend” podcast he did with head Oscars writer Mike Sweeney.
“At one point, I thought wouldn’t it be great if it’s just on the couch? Let’s lay it on a really big couch and I’ll be vacuuming and say, ‘Could you at least lift your feet? Or could you at least get up and help? Load the dishwasher?’ We wanted to do it and they just said, ‘No, no no, that can’t happen.’”
“One of the people from the Academy came forward and said, ‘Oscar can never be horizontal.’ And that blew my mind. Like, wow, this is like the thigh bone of St. Peter. This is a religious icon,” the comedian added.
O’Brien said when he pitched the idea of the Oscar statue wearing an apron and serving him dinner, he was told, “No clothing on Oscar. Oscar is always naked.”
Another proposed concept that never got off the ground included O’Brien inserting himself into some of the Best Picture-nominated features, starting with “Wicked.”
“It was the idea that, ‘Oh, Conan’s now going to goof on all the movies,’” O’Brien said. “It starts with me and I’m in ‘Wicked’ and I’m all green, finishing ‘Defying Gravity’ or one of those songs. And I finish it and then you cut to the next thing, which is ‘Gladiator II’ and ‘clang, clang, clang’ with swords and you see that I’m a gladiator but then you notice that I’m still green. And then you go on to ‘Conclave’ and you see people voting with their ballots and one of the hands is still green.”
“The whole thing was that the dye wouldn’t come off and we had to shoot it in one day,” he said.
Overall, O’Brien was praised for his hosting performance, with the major complaint being that the whole thing was played too safe, and the ceremony ended up long and boring.
