Conan O’Brien Details Oscars Opening That Got Cut, Says the Academy Refused to Let Him Put Clothes on an Oscar or Lay It Down Horizontally: ‘That Blew My Mind’
Conan O’Brien and his Oscars head writer Mike Sweeney revealed on the former’s podcast that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to let them put clothes on an Oscar or have it presented horizontally. O’Brien hosted the 2025 Academy Awards earlier this month and had some ideas for a promo video that got turned down. The promo featured O’Brien and a 9-foot-tall Oscar statuette as a domestic couple.
“We’re fighting about things couples fight about,” O’Brien said on the “Conan Needs a Friend” podcast about the promo. “At one point, I thought wouldn’t it be great if it’s just on the couch? Let’s lay it on a really big couch and I’ll be vacuuming and say, ‘Could you at least lift your feet? Or could you at least get up and help? Load the dishwasher?’ We wanted to do it and they just said, ‘No, no no, that can’t happen.’”
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O’Brien remembered, “One of the people from the Academy came forward and said, ‘Oscar can never be horizontal.’ And that blew my mind. Like, wow, this is like the thigh bone of St. Peter. This is a religious icon.”
When the duo wanted to put an apron on the statuette to depict it as a housewife serving O’Brien leftovers, the Academy said: “No clothing on Oscar. Oscar is always naked.” The promo ended up being made without these additions.
Elsewhere on the podcast, O’Brien revealed the original opening to the 2025 Oscars that got scrapped. The bit that made it to air was a direct spoof of “The Substance” in which O’Brien crawled out of the back of Demi Moore. The sketch recalled Billy Crystal’s annual tradition of starting the Oscars by digitally inserting himself into scenes from the nominees. O’Brien originally planned to do that on a larger scale.
“It was the idea that, ‘Oh, Conan’s now going to goof on all the movies,’” O’Brien said. “It starts with me and I’m in ‘Wicked’ and I’m all green, finishing ‘Defying Gravity’ or one of those songs. And I finish it and then you cut to the next thing, which is ‘Gladiator II’ and ‘clang, clang, clang’ with swords and you see that I’m a gladiator but then you notice that I’m still green. And then you go on to ‘Conclave’ and you see people voting with their ballots and one of the hands is still green.”
Conan would’ve eventually popped up in “Dune: Part Two,” where Javier Bardem was going to break the fourth wall by calling out O’Brien for starting the Oscars parody by going green for “Wicked.”
“The whole thing was that the dye wouldn’t come off and we had to shoot it in one day,” O’Brien said, noting the video would’ve also included characters like Count Orlok from “Nosferatu” piling on him for the mistake.
“We loved it,” Sweeney said of the axed bit. “It was hammered out before the fires happened, and even after that we kind of honed it.”
The Los Angeles fires resulted in the Academy pivoting to start the Oscars with a montage of famous movies set in L.A. The video package led into a musical performance from “Wicked” Oscar nominees Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, which was then followed by O’Brien’s “Substance” parody and his opening monologue.
Watch O’Brien and Sweeney discuss the Oscars in the video below.
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