It’s that time of year again:
Time to speculate about who’ll host the next Oscar show.
The show’s producers, Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer, have been in place for more than three months now, and we’re now past the time when the last Oscar hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, were announced.
According to Deadline, Cohen and Mischer offered the gig to the well-received 2009 host, Hugh Jackman (left), who declined; I’ve been told by someone on the production side that Justin Timberlake’s name was in the mix early on as well.
So who will they get?
These thoughts were inspired by musings at In Contention, where Guy Lodge puts in a vote for Steve Martin (his favorite past host, and mine) hosting not with Baldwin, but with Tina Fey, and by reader suggestions there and at Awards Daily and The Envelope and Hollywood Elsewhere.
It makes sense, to begin with, that Cohen and Mischer would approach Jackman, who reportedly declined an offer to return from last year’s producers, Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic, as well. The Jackman-hosted Oscars received a significantly more positive reaction within the Academy and ABC than the Martin/Baldwin show, though that likely has more to do with the shows’ overall production than their hosts.
But Jackman represented something of a new attitude – a move away from the normal choice of a standup comic who acts, into a movie star who can entertain. Although it wasn’t completely followed through the following year, the move felt right; the standup-comic route seems a little played out, while, you know, movie stars are forever.
But there aren’t many movie stars with the charm and charisma to pull it off – and the ones who might be able to do it, including George Clooney and Will Smith and Tom Hanks, have shown reluctance in the past to take a gig that offers the opportunity to fail on an epic scale, and a near guarantee that some people aren’t going to like what you do.
They could go younger with Ewan McGregor, or younger than that with Ben Affleck, or way younger with the Broadway-bound Daniel Radcliffe. But none of them quite feel right.
Kevin Spacey (right, with Julia Roberts) certainly has the skill set, and Bruce Cohen was the producer on Spacey’s Oscar-winning turn in “American Beauty.” But the actor lives in London, and has been spending most of his time running the Old Vic theater in London.
Robert Downey Jr. could no doubt tackle it, and might bring in a slightly younger audience than Spacey. Neil Patrick Harris always gets votes when a host gig is up for grabs, but he has very little film cachet and his choice would seem as if the Oscars were taking leftovers from the Emmys, Grammys and Tonys.
