Oscars 2019: who should be the host?
After the nearly four-hour-long 2018 Oscars telecast saw the Super Bowl of Cinema dip to its lowest ratings ever, with 26.5 million viewers marking a 19% drop from the previous year’s ceremony, much ink has been spilled over the supposed irrelevance of the Academy Awards. Every year, the punditry arrives like clockwork, with suggestions that the Oscars’ hemorrhaging viewership is of a piece with broader changes in television consumption (true); that the ceremony focuses too heavily on technical awards like costume, production and sound design (also, perhaps, true); or that, to its own detriment, the Academy honors arty, esoteric films largely unseen by the America public (the jury’s out on that one).
In response to the precipitous decline in viewership that followed a brief spike in 2014, when Ellen DeGeneres hosted, the Academy attempted earlier this year to redress those grievances by announcing it would trim its telecast to three hours, air it in February instead of March, and introduce a new category, Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film. The first two changes were greeted with consensus approval; the second, however, with derision, since the implicit suggestion was that lucrative films aren’t good enough to simply be nominated for best picture, that something central distinguishes movies that perform at the box office from “high art”.
Thankfully, after making a royal mess of its roll-out, the Academy scrapped the popular film award. And the likely presence at the ceremony of films like Black Panther, A Star is Born and Mary Poppins Returns will ensure it isn’t entirely starved of movies beloved by large, cinema-going swaths of the body politic. But perhaps these pre-emptive measures to stave off the Oscars’ impending obsolescence – neither the Golden Globes or even the Super Bowl, after all, are the monocultural events they used to be – are misguided. Could the Oscars be saved by simply picking a good host?
The Academy announced in September 2017 that Jimmy Kimmel would be returning to host the 2018 awards, one year after he did his best to mitigate the chaos caused by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s epic blunder (which, though unfortunate for the utterly deserving cast of Moonlight, illustrated the indispensability of spontaneous live-television snafus). But now it’s December and the Academy has still yet to announce a host for February’s ceremony, set to air on Kimmel’s home network, ABC.
They could very well go for a hattrick and give the job to the late-night host yet again, but that would be a rather safe and uncontroversial pick, which runs counter to the prevailing dogma that what the Academy needs is a jolt of energy, a kind of facelift. Ellen, one of the most admired and agreeable people in television, presided over the best-viewed Oscars telecast of the last decade, when the 2014 ceremony brought in almost 44 million viewers. But with the general currents pointing away from marquee eventtelevision, it’s hard to say she’d provide the 2019 ceremony with an equivalent boost. So, in the spirit of the American pastime that is offering unsolicited opinions about the Oscars, some recommendations for the Academy as it presumably considers its 2019 master of ceremonies.
Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph The bright spot in last year’s otherwise exhaustive Oscars telecast was, of course, the comic duo of Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph, who announced the awards for documentary and live-action short in an extended gag that skewered the ceremony’s overwhelming whiteness. The pair waltzed on to the stage at the Dolby Theatre with their high heels in hand, lampooning the sheer endlessness of awards season and supplying the ceremony with a much-needed trickle of self-mockery. Given Haddish’s meteoric ascent since her delightful turn in Girls Trip, and the duo’s undeniable comic camaraderie, they’d be an unassailable choice to host. The comments section below a YouTube clip of their 2018 appearance seems to bolster that assertion. “Please let them host next year,” reads the first. “I would actually watch it.” Key & Peele
The last time the Academy chose two hosts was 2011, when its bet on an influx of energy from Young Hollywood in the form of Anne Hathaway and James Franco failed miserably. The pair were fundamentally and amusingly mismatched, their comic and temperamental sensibilities in diametric opposition. It made for an awkward evening. That would not be a problem were the Academy to go with KeeganMichael Key and Jordan Peele, whose tongue-in-cheek rapport has worked to brilliant effect both live and on their sketch-comedy show Key & Peele. That Peele took home the original screenplay award for Get Out in 2018 would lend the ceremony a sense of continuity, or perhaps a rush of new viewers, and remind them of his comic origins. Kristen Wiig
Any highlight reel of the best awards show moments from years past would disproportionately feature comic-laureate Kirsten Wiig, whose gags at the 2013, 2015, and 2017 Golden Globes, alongside Will Ferrell, Bill Hader and Steve Carrell, respectively, were welcome departures from the monotony of Hollywood self-aggrandizement (not to mention Wiig and her Bridesmaid’s costars’ Martin Scorsese drinking game at the 2012 SAGs, a rare, improvisatory awards show triumph). Wiig’s comedy is sharp, goofy, playful and dexterous, which would fit the bill for a ceremony that asks a lot of its hosts, from opening monologues to live stunts to elaborate dance numbers. Just don’t make her sing, of course.
Trevor Noah
Jon Stewart was in rare form at the 2008 Oscars, where his opening monologue was a hit, a refreshingly droll and appropriately scornful send-up of Hollywood pageantry. The Academy, then, would be well advised to assign hosting duties to his Daily Show successor Trevor Noah, who over the past two years has separated himself from the ever-growing pack of Trump satirists with comedy that’s at once earnest, erudite and screwballish. Noah is charming, too, and one wonders if the Oscars, often ridiculed as a kind of circle-jerk of limousine liberalism, should throw caution to the wind and lean into the low-hanging fruit that is anti-Trump comedy.
John Mulaney
On the heels of a wildly successful, Emmy-award winning Netflix special, and an opening monologue with Nick Kroll at the 2018 Spirit Awards that was perhaps the most lacerating rebuke of sexually abusive Hollywood heavyweights of last year’s awards season, John Mulaney would be a superb if risky choice to helm the 2019 ceremony. He would not exactly attract as many eyeballs as the aforementioned options, and he wouldcertainly ruffle feathers, but Mulaney’s stock is rising and he would be a fitting choice for an awards body desperate to prove it isn’t out of touch with young folk, who make up a large contingent of Mulaney’s fanbase.