The 2021 Academy Awards are set to air Sunday, April 25 at 8 p.m. ET. The show will air on ABC live from Los Angeles at Union Station and for the third straight year there will be no formal host.
There hasn’t been a host since actor Kevin Hart stepped down as the planned host of the 2019 Oscars. The decision came amidst an uproar over his past homophobic jokes. The show subsequently went without a host and was deemed a success. The show opened with a movie montage rather than the usual monologue, and various actors introduced awards and segments.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences elected to continue without a host in 2020 and will do so again this year. It’s unclear if that will change in the future, but this is not a new thing. There was no host for the 1939 show, three straight years from 1969 to 1971, and once more in 1989.
The last time there was a host was 2018 when Jimmy Kimmel hosted for a second straight year. Prior to Kimmel, no host had handled back-to-back shows since Billy Crystal in 1997 and 1998.