Here's a strange article. David Letterman hosted the Academy Awards in 1995 to generally unfavorable reaction. Jason Bailey thinks Dave did a great job and interviewed him about it, apparently with the goal of convincing him it wasn't the disaster he [Dave] made it out to be.
Personally, I don't think a lot of people care very much about who hosts the Oscars and certainly not for very long after the ceremony. I don't really get why it's a discussion topic twenty-five years later. For what it's worth, I wrote about my feelings on this timely topic a few years ago here…
Within the Academy hierarchy though, they weren't fond of Letterman as host…The complaint was along the lines of, "Dave didn't understand or care that this wasn't supposed to be The David Letterman Show with occasional interruptions to present some silly awards. The man only knows one way to do a TV show and he kept expecting everything to be done that way." My feeling was that it was a slightly-unfair criticism. You ask Dave Letterman to host your show, you shouldn't moan when he comes in and acts like Dave Letterman. I thought he was the wrong guy for the job but he did just what they should have expected and he was more entertaining than some Oscar hosts…like, say, most of them.
This is a wild speculation but I'm thinking that Letterman's disappointment with the night was that proved, at least to him, that he wasn't Johnny Carson. I'm not saying his talk show was better or worse than Carson's…
No, come to think of it, I will. I think the first half of his late night talk show career was better than Johnny's and the last half wasn't. But the point is he wasn't the all-around entertainer Carson was, capable of letting most others shine.
Mr. Bailey's article says "Some of the most scathing reviews came from the West Coast, whose inhabitants may have resented this outsider, this New York wiseass, flying in to make light of their big night." I don't think it was that at all. West Coast inhabitants haven't changed that much in a quarter-of-a-century and the current crop doesn't seem to resent Ricky Gervais pissing all over the Golden Globe Awards and their recipients. I just think Letterman didn't seem to connect with the ceremony he was hosting just as in his later years on CBS, he didn't seem to be that interested in most of his guests or the show with his name in the title or even with his own monologues. But when he was good…