The 91st Academy Awards, commonly referred to as The Oscars, will take place on Sunday, February 24th. The awards show is already off to a unique start, as they have no host set for this year. The last time this occurred was 30 years ago, in 1989. Comedian and actor, Kevin Hart, was originally set to host this year until his homophobic tweets from 2008 resurfaced. After backlash, Hart decided to drop out from hosting, two months prior to the show, leaving the producers scrambling and ultimately deciding to have a no-host show.

 Following Hart’s decision, Ellen DeGeneres, who herself has hosted the Oscars twice already (in 2007 and 2014) and is an LGBTQ activist, urged the Academy to reconsider Hart for the job. She even went so far as having him on her talk show. During the interview, DeGeneres revealed, “So I called the Academy today because I really want you to host the Oscars…and they were like, oh my God. We want him to host. We feel that maybe he misunderstood.” To this Hart responded by saying “The flip-side is to any attack, there’s another side. There’s a B side…On my side, openly, I say I’m wrong for my past words,” and continued on to explain that this was “an attack.” “To go through 40,000 tweets, to get back to 2008 that’s an attack…That’s an attack to end me,” Hart told Degeneres.

So far, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences has not revealed that they plan to have a host or even acknowledged the situation during the nomination reveal.

In addition to having no host, and trying to keep the show down to three hours, the Academy decided to postpone the new category of “Outstanding Popular Film”, which was supposed to premiere during this year’s show. The category was postponed due to problems dealing with voting issues and backlash from adding in a category that some believe make the Oscars less prestigious, and too similar to the People’s Choice Awards (where the audience votes for the winners) although the voting specifics were never disclosed.

The nominations were revealed on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 by actor Kumail Nanjiani and actress Tracee Ellis Ross. The hosts announced the nominees for each category. Despite there only being 24 categories, the award show often exceeds its predicted three hour run time. In order to avoid that and boost ratings, many wins will not be broadcasted live, but rather be given out during commercial breaks and broadcast later on, which is how the Tony Awards do it. These categories will most likely be the categories deemed as “boring” by the audience such as sound mixing and editing, documentary feature and short, and more categories along those lines.

When the nominations were revealed, Roma and The Favourite both lead with 10 nominations, followed by Vice and A Star Is Born with 8 nominations, and Black Panther with 7 nominations. Here is the full list of all of the nominees, but up for the top prize of the night, Best Picture, are Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Black Panther, BlacKKKlansman, Green Book, Vice, A Star Is Born, and Roma. Black Panther also made history by being the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture. To see if any more records get broken, make sure to tune in on February 22nd, 2019.