Ellen DeGeneres has a massive platform and has apparently decided to use it to rehab Kevin Hart’s reputation after the actor stepped down from his 2019 Oscars hosting gig in December. DeGeneres has shared an interview with Hart on her talk show in which she says that she still believes he should have the host role. Our question is: why?
Let’s back up: Hart removed himself from the 2019 Oscars after some of his old homophobic tweets resurfaced, tweets that said things like he would break his daughter’s dollhouse over his son’s head if he tried to play with it because “that’s gay.” Hart’s initial response was not to apologize but to ask that critics “please take your negative energy and put it into something constructive”—though it was still reported that Hart was deleting the old tweets. Less than a week after he was announced, he had apologized and stepped down.
Since then, the Oscars host spot has remained unfilled; we speculated that the disconnect between the old guard who run the show and what audiences actually want (the younger online crowd, especially) is to blame and that it might even be better not to have a host at all.
That disconnect seems to be the same one at work in the latest development in the Oscars host saga, in which DeGeneres had Hart on her show for a kind of rehabilitation interview, in which she gave him a platform to apologize again to the LGBTQ community and in which she personally absolves him. Not only that; in the interview, DeGeneres admits to actually calling the Academy to try and get Hart reinstated. “I called them, I said, ‘Kevin’s on. I have no idea if he wants to come back and host, but what are your thoughts?’” DeGeneres said. “And they were like, ‘Oh my god, we want him to host! We feel like that maybe he misunderstood or it was handled wrong, or maybe we said the wrong thing, but we want him to host. Whatever we can do, we would be thrilled. And he should host the Oscars.’
For his part, Hart follows the same penchant for self-inquiry that he’s so far displayed since the Oscars hubbub began, which is close to none. He says his hesitation to considering hosting again is not because he still feels bad about his past views on gay people but because of the people who combed through his tweets, saying, “That’s a malicious attack on my character. That’s an attack to end me.”
But the outrage about Hart’s old comments—and his lack of introspection and genuine interrogation of why his tweets were so upsetting—isn’t new; what is now stoking backlash is DeGeneres, a very high-profile lesbian woman in entertainment, cosigning Hart with what feels like very little cause. DeGeneres herself used the word “trolls” to describe the people who called for Hart’s resignation (not to mention the reporters and activists who wrote about the tweets). What’s more, she connected her own marginalized experience to Hart being pushed out of the gig: “As a gay person,” DeGeneres said, “I am sensitive to all of that, and I talked to you about all of this, and you’ve already expressed that it’s not being educated on the subject, not realizing how dangerous those words are, not realizing how many kids are killed for being gay, or beaten up every day. You have grown, you have apologized, you are apologizing again right now. You’ve done it. Don’t let those people win. Host the Oscars.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: Vanity Fair