Kevin Hart apologizes to LGBTQ community again, says he likely won't be hosting the Oscars
Kevin Hart took to his Straight From The Hart SiriusXM radio show on Monday to again apologize for his past comments about the LGBTQ community, the ones that eventually led him to step down as the host of this year’s Academy Awards.
“I will say this and I want to make this very clear…once again, Kevin Hart apologizes for his remarks that hurt members of the LGBTQ community,” he said, prefacing it, however, with a comment about how he’s sure that “after this interview, they’ll cut this up and find things that I said that wasn’t enunciated correctly.”
He added, “Because now we’re in a space where I’m around people of the LGBTQ community and I’m now aware of how these words make them feel and why they say, ‘That shit hurt because of what I’ve been through.’ So then we say, ‘Ay man, as a group, let’s erase this shit. We don’t talk like this no more. Let’s not do this. We don’t post this shit on social media and, more importantly, within my comedy act, I’m going to make sure that I don’t do anything else offensive because I talked to some friends of mine.’”
That doesn’t mean he’s game to host this year’s Oscars. “I don’t have time to prepare and do it correctly,” he said. “The microscope on me is so, is so fucking thick that they’re looking for everything. So anything, anything that I say that’s not appropriate, that’s wrong…you’re gonna pick me apart.”
He’s not wrong. After repeatedly claiming that he’d apologized for his remarks in the past, for example, a number of journalists found that claim to be bogus. Hart also received more backlash after framing himself as a victim in an an interview with Ellen DeGeneres. In the interview, DeGeneres voiced her support for Hart and revealed that, in a call she personally placed on his behalf, that the Academy still wanted him for the job. Degeneres, who called those offended by Hart’s aggressively homophobic tweets “haters,” received some backlash of her own.
The 91st Academy Awards will be held on February 24. There probably won’t be a host.