Conan O'Brien reveals Oscars 2026 prep strategy two days before Academy Awards

Conan O'Brien sat down with The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, two days before the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, to talk about what goes into hosting the Oscars for a second consecutive year. The interview covered his writing process, the jokes that almost made the cut, and what he learned from last year's show that is directly shaping how he approaches March 15 in Los Angeles. Returning hosts are rare at the Oscars, and O'Brien is the first to host back-to-back since Billy Crystal did it in the 1990s.

O'Brien told the Reporter that returning for a second year brought a different kind of pressure. The first year he was the unknown quantity, and the audience had no established expectations. This year they do. He said his writing team started working on material about six weeks before the ceremony, longer than last year's timeline, partly because the team wanted extra time to field-test jokes in front of small audiences before locking anything.

The joke that got cut and why tone is the hardest thing to calibrate

O'Brien revealed that his team wrote and rehearsed at least one joke targeting a Best Picture nominee that was eventually pulled from the script. He did not name the film or describe the joke in detail, but said the decision to cut it came down to tone rather than offensiveness. The punchline worked in the writers' room but kept landing wrong in read-throughs, coming across as dismissive of the film rather than playful about it. He said the distinction between a joke that teases something and a joke that dismisses it is harder to find in a live setting where you cannot rely on facial expression or timing adjustments the way you can in a late-night monologue.

This is a problem that every Oscars host eventually runs into. The nominees in any given year include films people have deep personal investments in, and the line between industry-insider ribbing and accidentally alienating a section of the room is genuinely narrow. O'Brien's background in late-night television, where he spent decades writing and performing for an audience that showed up specifically to see him, is different from the Oscars room, where half the audience would prefer if the host got out of the way quickly.

What O'Brien said he learned from hosting the 97th ceremony

The 97th Academy Awards, which O'Brien hosted in March 2025, drew a television audience of approximately 18.1 million viewers in the United States, according to Nielsen fast affiliate data, up from 19.5 million for the 96th ceremony in 2024. O'Brien's hosting was broadly well-received by critics, with Variety's awards columnist calling his monologue one of the more confident opening sets in recent memory. The ceremony ran 3 hours and 22 minutes, which was longer than the Academy had publicly targeted.

O'Brien told the Reporter that the pacing lesson was the most useful thing he took from 2025. He said he now thinks about the host's role during the middle of the show differently, specifically the moments between major award categories when the audience at home is most likely to change channels. Last year, he said, some of those in-show bits ran about 90 seconds longer than they should have. His team trimmed material this year specifically to protect those transitions.

The 98th Academy Awards field and what the nominations look like

The 98th Academy Awards will hand out 23 competitive awards. The Best Picture field this year includes ten nominees, the maximum allowed under the Academy's current preferential ballot system, which has been in place since 2010. Several nominees in the major categories are films that performed well at international film festivals in 2025 and then received wide releases in the October-to-December window that the Academy's voting membership tends to favor.

The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 5:00 PM Pacific time on Sunday, March 15, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, the same venue that has hosted the Oscars since 2002. ABC will broadcast the ceremony in the United States, with streaming available on Hulu for subscribers. International broadcast arrangements vary by territory.

How O'Brien's preparation compares to other recent hosts

Oscars hosts in recent years have taken different approaches to preparation. Jimmy Kimmel, who hosted the 95th and 96th ceremonies in 2023 and 2024, has spoken in interviews about working with a core team of three writers he has collaborated with for over a decade and running material through ABC late-night staff who could provide rapid feedback. The Oscars writing process is complicated by the fact that nominees are not publicly announced until several weeks before the ceremony, compressing the window for material specific to that year's films.

O'Brien mentioned in the Hollywood Reporter interview that he finds the constraint productive rather than limiting. Knowing the nominees locks the material and forces the team to commit, which he said is actually easier than the open-ended phase before nominations are announced, when almost anything could theoretically be written. His team's six-week preparation timeline, starting from nominations announcement to ceremony day, involved three full dress rehearsals of the opening monologue, with the final version locked on Friday, March 13, two days before broadcast.

What to expect from the ceremony itself

The Academy has not announced any major structural changes to the ceremony format for 2026. The eight categories that were moved to commercial-break presentations in 2023, covering areas including documentary short, live-action short, and animated short, remain in that format for the 98th ceremony. O'Brien said in the Reporter interview that he would not use a teleprompter for the monologue, the same approach he took in 2025, and that the monologue was written to run between 10 and 12 minutes.

The Academy set a public target of finishing the broadcast in under three hours and 15 minutes, roughly seven minutes shorter than last year's actual run time. Whether that target is met will depend partly on acceptance speech length, which the Academy has limited to 45 seconds with a soft cut from the orchestra, a policy that has been inconsistently enforced in recent years. The 98th ceremony airs live on ABC on Sunday, March 15, 2026.