Even in the best of circumstances, hosting the Oscars has become a thankless task. Perhaps in the time of Bob Hope or Johnny Carson, it was simpler. You just had to go out and compere, crack a few droll jokes, keep things moving. Now, the hosts are practically expected to be a whole spectacle themselves. It’s clear public’s interest in the Academy Awards is waning: the audience for last year’s Covid-struck event managed less than 20 per cent of the Oscars’ 1998 peak, but numbers had been dwindling for years. So the onus falls on the hosts not just to bring their usual schtick, but to revivify the whole ordeal – to drag the Oscars kicking and screaming (or should that be crying and fawning?) into the 21st century. For tonight’s ceremony, that task falls to three women: Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes.
How exactly presenters are supposed to do this remains a point of ambiguity. You could argue that Ellen DeGeneres was most successful, when she hosted in 2015. Holding aloft a phone on a stick and cramming more stars into one tableau than Vincent Van Gogh could dream of, DeGeneres undeniably made waves with her “Oscar selfie”. Like the early pandemic “Imagine” video, this was luvvie vanity at its most obnoxious: Hollywood’s desperate “it crowd” smarm laid bare in one viral jpeg. But you can’t knock the results. DeGeneres’s photograph was retweeted 2.9 million times, becoming one of the most popular tweets in the history of the social media site. She had cut through to the online era in a way that no other presenter has before or since.
