Neil Patrick Harris: Hosting Oscars Once is Enough

Neil Patrick Harris hosted this year’s Oscars last month, and said recently that once is likely enough. The How I Met Your Mother star says it’s not something he anticipates doing again. Y...
Neil Patrick Harris: Hosting Oscars Once is Enough
Written by Kimberly Ripley
  • Neil Patrick Harris hosted this year’s Oscars last month, and said recently that once is likely enough. The How I Met Your Mother star says it’s not something he anticipates doing again.

    You’ll no doubt recall that Neil Patrick Harris had big shoes to fill this year. He followed in the footsteps of Ellen DeGeneres as Oscars host, and those are some big shoes to fill.

    “I don’t know that my family nor my soul could take it,” he said during an interview with the Huffington Post. “It’s a beast. It was fun to check off the list, but for the amount of time spent and the understandable opinionated response, I don’t know that it’s a delightful balance to do every year or even again.”

    Neil Patrick Harris even admitted that following the criticism of everything he did while hosting the Oscars was a bit disconcerting.

    “It was interesting to see just what people thought landed and didn’t. It’s so difficult for one who’s simply watching the show to realize just how much time and concession and compromise and explanation has gone into almost every single thing. Every joke. Wording of joke. Placement of joke. Canceling of joke. Embellishment for just one line,” he said .”And I’m not saying that to defend everything I said as if it was the absolute best choice, but it’s also an award show, and you’re powering through 14 acts filled with 20 plus awards. So my job was to try and keep things as light and specific to this year’s set of films as possible. And if people are critical of that, it’s a big giant platform, so I would assume that they would be.”

    How do you think Neil Patrick Harris did as host of the 2015 Oscars? Did he even hold a candle to Ellen DeGeneres’s performance the year before? Do you think Ellen will come back next year to host the 2016 Oscars? And if not, who do you suppose the 2016 host might be?

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