Conan O’Brien Accidentally Gave a Shout-Out to a Literal Nazi During the Oscars
It’s not uncommon for Oscar hosts to pay homage to the Academy’s long history, but some of that history is actually pretty unpleasant.
During this year’s never-ending ceremony, host Conan O’Brien happened to mention the first ever Best Actor Oscar winner, Emil Jannings, who took home the award for his work in The Way of All Flesh. This was way back in 1929, when the ceremony mercifully lasted for just 15 minutes.
While Conan only brought Jennings up in order to tee-up a joke about an Electric Boogaloo-esque Way of All Flesh sequel (we’ll let you fill in the pun yourselves), he neglected to mention that this particular Oscar win had a pretty unfortunate epilogue. Like really unfortunate.
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Jannings didn’t actually get the most votes for the award, Rin Tin Tin did, but the Academy refused to give the award to a dog, lest it impugn the credibility of the organization that would later give its top prize to the director of Dumb and Dumber 2 for a movie that was worse than Dumb and Dumber 2.
In any case, Jannings, who began his career in Germany, went back after his Hollywood career began to fade, partly owing to the fact that he was a jerk to his co-stars. Why return to Germany? Well, in order to star in Nazi propaganda films. According to The Independent, Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels “believed that Jannings would be a useful tool for the Nazis and suggested he work on propaganda films.”
After World War II, Jannings wasn’t just let off the hook for his collaboration with the Nazis. The Allied Forces “rejected claims that he had worked reluctantly for Hitler,” as evidenced by the fact that Goebbels’ diaries “specifically praised the actor’s commitment to the Nazi cause.” And Jannings supposedly used his Oscar win to save his own butt when Allied troops took Berlin, shouting “Don’t shoot, I have won an Oscar!” while holding the trophy as evidence.
Obviously Conan wasn’t going to get into all of that during a brief interstitial awards show segment, but a lot of viewers seemed surprised/horrified that the disgraced old-timey actor got any kind of shout-out during the ceremony.
It’s entirely possible that Conan didn’t know any of this, and would have scrapped the jokey reference had he perused Jannings’ Wikipedia for, like, 20 seconds.