He’s not feeling the hart towards the Academy Awards.
Kevin Hart has stated that he’ll never host the Oscars.
“Whatever little hope you had, I want to destroy it right now,” the comedian, 44, told Sky News in an interview published Friday.
“Those gigs aren’t good gigs for comics. It’s no shot to the Oscars, no shot to the Globes or anything else. Those just aren’t comedy-friendly environments anymore.”
His statement comes in the wake of fellow comedian Jo Koy recently flopping at the 81st Golden Globes.
Jimmy Kimmel will host the 2024 Oscars, which will air March 10 on ABC.
Hart himself has never hosted the Academy Awards. He was tapped to do the gig in 2019, but he stepped down just two days after that announcement, after 7-year-old homophobic tweets surfaced, causing controversy. (One of his Tweets from 2011 read, “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.”)
“I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s … this is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing talented artists,” Hart wrote in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, at the time.
“I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past.”
This announcement followed a message Hart posted on Instagram, saying that Motion Picture Academy officials had asked him to apologize or they would find another host — and he refused to apologize.
Hart told Sky News, “I think they got it right one year where it was like just a bunch of personalities acting as the hosts and that’s a nice thing. It’s a collaborative thing, different people get to be responsible for act one, act two, act three, but you know, the days of it being a room for a comic, those days are done.”
Hart has previously hosted the BET Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards and the MTV Movie Awards.
“Shout out to those that have cracked the code and done it right early on, you know, the Chris Rocks of the world, the Billy Crystals of the world, the girls we’ve had like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler. Ricky Gervais,” Hart told the outlet.
“There’s a lot of people that understand that if you’re not an industry comic, meaning a comic that has the relationships of all, then those rooms are very cold … It’s not the gig that it was of old. It’s too much pressure on the idea of a comic and what’s jokes and not jokes. So, it’s tough.”
