The Academy is playing it down the middle with its controversy-free choice of Kimmel as Oscars host. But in a year already packed with controversy, it might be just what we need.”>
Its been a year of battle lines. The country has never been more polarized, and passionately so. Culture has never simmered so violently in a cauldron of outrage, smugness, joy, hope, hate, progress, activism, protest, silencing, and all other kinds of combustible emotions.
And so to neutralize the forthcoming cultural chemical spill, Hollywood has chosen the industry equivalent of baking soda to host this years Oscars ceremony.
This is among the latest the Academy has ever named a host, likely because it didnt quite know how to address the cultural climate. In choosing Jimmy Kimmel, whom the Academy announced as host Monday morning, the organization is making a point not to play with the barometric pressure.
Its the safest choice they could have made in a stormy year like this, the emcee equivalent of an umbrella shielding the ceremony from any controversy. But is it the right choice?
After what essentially amounts to a decade of mixed reviews for the Oscars telecast and plummeting ratingsratings that are highly unlikely to go up this year given the fact that theres not a crowd-pleasing blockbuster among the crop of indie films likely to dominatethe ceremony seems to be surrendering a bit.
Risk, edge, and danger have always seemed to be the hallmarks of showbiz ambition. Its unlikely that those three words will be used in any capacity to describe a Kimmel-hosted Oscars telecast. But as the Academy has also learned, those qualities havent always made for a successful ceremony, either.
More, after successive years of bad press, the Academy needs a win as much as culture seems to. And to that regard, Kimmel boasts the best batting average of likely hosts. He was spectacular last fall at the Emmys, and boasts the kind of confidence that the ceremony requires. Hes not a question mark. We can pretty much imagine what his show will look like, for better or worse. (In my opinion, for the better.)
Hosting the Oscars is a notoriously thankless job. No critic is ever pleased with the performance.
You either insert yourself into the ceremony too much, or not enough. You were either too reverent to the shows pompousness or you were too controversial and impolite. The telecast itself is televisions longest slog. When youre the driver of it, youre assigned the blame for it taking so long even though you have no control over the trafficthe sheer number of awards and montagesso to speak.
When Chris Rock was named host of last years ceremony, viewers buckled up for a host who was finally going to take the air out of Hollywoods inflated ego. When, for the second year in a row, no acting nominees of color were named and the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag dominated all Oscars conversations, viewers downright salivated imagining the brutal honesty with which he was going to tear into the Academy.
In the end, though, Rock got a mixed reaction. His opening monologue was as searing as most of us hoped (though some felt he could have gone even further, especially when he devalued those who had protested against the whitewashed nominee slate), but his performance grew increasingly tone-deaf and jokes began landing with echoing thuds.
Perhaps no combination of host, cultural debate, and nominee slate seemed more primed for a hit ceremony than Rock and last years #OscarsSoWhite ceremony, albeit under embarrassing and unfortunate circumstances. And still the ceremony didnt deliver on its promise.
So what if the promise of the ceremony is just to befine? That seems to be the message sent with Kimmel, the late-night host that pretty much everyone is cool with, especially ABC, which airs both the Oscars and Kimmels talk show.
Where the Oscars seem to have gotten themselves in trouble in the past decade is when they seemed to be chasing an audience.
It didnt attract the adoration of the youths, as intended, with its selection of Anne Hathaway and James Franco. (If anything, it chased away those who already were fans of the ceremony.) It didnt win back the establishment by playing to tradition with its reactionary hiring of Billy Crystal the following year.
Reactionary hirings in general have been a disaster for the Academy, be it Crystal in response to the Hathaway-Franco debacle or, the following year, the raunch-and-roast stylings of Seth MacFarlane to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction of taste.
Playing it down the middle isnt always the greatest idea. Perhaps no awards host is more seasoned and celebrated than Neil Patrick Harris, but he didnt exactly pull off any magic tricksthough he literally triedwhen he landed the most prestigious hosting gig in 2015. And the combination of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin was similarly unmemorable in 2010.
That said, the so-called boring choice has been a proven one. Ellen DeGeneres hosting two of the best-reviewed telecasts in the last decade with her performances in 2007 and 2014, proving that going mainstream and middling works. More, if you think about how great Hugh Jackmans hosting turn was in 2009 when combined with DeGeneress, the lesson might be that a sense of humor that is, for lack of a better word, nice is the safest thing to do.
Is Jimmy Kimmel nice? As he proved at the Emmys this year, he deftly walks a balance where he can poke fun but is not too mean-spirited. He can address elephants in the room, but hes not going to poach them, per se, as much as hell just prod at them.
Might it have been a bolder choice to, say, hire a host who was going to ruthlessly go after Donald Trump and the scary things happening in our country right now? That might have arguably been necessary, or even noble, given Hollywoods endless speechifying about its players politics. Kimmel did open the Emmys, if you remember, with a Trump takedowneven if hes not the first name you think of when you consider political comedians.
But bold choices tend not to work, historically, at the Oscars. Jimmy Kimmel? He just might.
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