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The Academy Awards, frankly, is a loser of a gig to host. It’s not the Golden Globes. You can’t have fun with people the way Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have. It’s not a sprawling, drunken night where TV and film and comedy and drama are all mixed together into a sloppy lovefest. The Oscars takes itself way more seriously, which puts hosts in this awkward, unfunny place where they have to balance between gravitas and levity, austerity and actual humor.
It’s for this reason that the mantle has so often fallen to the world’s most seasoned comedians (Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Hope, Billy Crystal, Johnny Carson); they’re the only ones who can shoulder that load (for examples of that load being dropped like a ton of bricks: see Seth MacFarlane, and the world’s least dynamic duo, James Franco and Anne Hathaway). But not even that scheme is fail-safe. Plenty of funny people (David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Steve Martin) have come home to middling reviews.
For the second year in a row, the Oscars will forge ahead hostless: Many will recall that no substitute was selected after Kevin Hart stepped down from the role last year after controversy surrounding offensive past jokes and tweets. And this year? It seems the post was just too tricky to fill. Reminiscing about the good old days of successful MCs? We've compiled a list of our favorite Oscars hosts from years past.
Chris Rock
Rock seemed to dance through 2016's trial by fire. True, Rock had hosted once before, in 2005, but the circumstances were far different: This was the year of #OscarsSoWhite. He tackled Hollywood and America’s racism head-on in his monologue, but both with jokes aimed directly at our comfort zones (“This year things are going to be a little different; this year in the in memoriam package, it’s just going to be black people that were shot by the cops on their way to the movies”) and those that were geared to get us on board (“Hollywood is sorority-racist: ‘We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa’”). To bring an unexpected voice, he enlisted underground comics with both smarts and edge, like Nimesh Patel, to write for the show. The result was the funniest Oscar night in years.
Ellen DeGeneres
The moment that is the most remembered, and shared, from DeGeneres’s hosting gig in 2014—her selfie with an A-list crowd of actors, which included Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, and Brad Pitt—was actually far from her finest joke. It was a gimmicky crowd-pleaser on a night that included much funnier moments (from her monologue: “I want to put the focus on you tonight: I did a little bit of research and between all the nominees here tonight you’ve made over 1,400 films. And you’ve gone to a total of six years of college”). When the evening wore on, her move to ask who wanted pizza, and then to collect money in Pharrell’s hat, was genius.
DeGeneres’s skill was in taking the Oscars’ balancing act and making it work with her inclusive but self-aware brand of comedy. That’s not as easy as it looks. Stewart couldn’t manage to bend the ceremony to his sardonic style the first time out, and Letterman bombed (as much as Letterman can ever bomb) when he tried to make the Oscars into his Late Night show back in 1995. Selfie, schmelfie: DeGeneres won at hosting the Oscars because she was able to be herself.
Jon Stewart
Stewart learned well from his less-than-wonderful hosting job in 2006, and came back two years later—the year Hollywood’s Writers Guild went on strike—with a vengeance. “There is some collateral damage from the strike: economically, emotionally, perhaps worst of all the cancellation of the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party. They said they did it out of ‘respect for the writers.’ You know another way they could show respect for the writers? Maybe one day invite some of them to the Vanity Fair Oscar party.”
Stewart’s jokes were knowing and inside—playful and jibing and smooth (“Diablo Cody went from being an exotic dancer to an Oscar-nominated screenwriter...I hope you’re enjoying the pay cut”). And once the monologue was done, Stewart faded into the background and let the show be the show. He took it easy with his duties. Except at one moment, perhaps the most generous in recent Oscar history: When actress Marketa Irglová’s acceptance speech—for best original song from Once—was cut off, Stewart called her back onstage to say her piece. What a mensch!
Whoopi Goldberg
“The key to being an Oscar host is you actually have to like the movies...You can’t be too cool for school, and you can’t try to make it your show,” Goldberg, who has hosted four times, recently told Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast. And yet few are cooler than Goldberg.
It’s true, other than Jack Lemmon, no other Oscar winner has hosted the show, but that’s not what separates Goldberg from the pack. Forget the awards (as 30 Rock famously pointed out, she’s EGOTed: She’s won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony; she has also received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and is an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters). No one can hold a room like Goldberg. It’s her absolute poise, control, and experience that allow her to take the Academy Awards not only through the night but to task. “Oscar is the only 74-year-old man in Hollywood who doesn’t need Viagra to last three hours,” she said in 2002. During the same ceremony, some five months after 9/11, she managed to get a laugh where few others could manage: “This has been a hell of a year. America has suffered through a great national tragedy. But we have recovered: Mariah Carey has already made another movie.”
Hugh Jackman
What do you get when you ask Bill Condon (the cowriter and director of Dreamgirls) to produce the Oscars: the Tonys! No, no, what you get is an all-singing, all-dancing, showstopping opening number (done on the cheap, with bad props, as part of a joke that the Academy could not afford an opening number) wherein Jackman charmed so thoroughly—incorporating audience members in a novel manner, not just lightly mocking them—he could have spent the rest of the night backstage. But he didn’t. He was a live wire all night, and where he didn’t have the humor reflex of, say, a Steve Martin, he made up for in Broadway-heeled chutzpah. Like when he and Beyoncé did a number together called “Musicals Are Back.” What’s not to love about that?
Billy Crystal
Famous for reinventing the romantic comedy hero in When Harry Met Sally…, Crystal also hosted the Oscars a total of nine times, between 1990 and 2012. His relaxed, jokey hosting style cemented his reputation as Hollywood’s goofy uncle, and nothing was off-limits to him, from a Hannibal Lecter entrance made to spoof Silence of the Lambs star Anthony Hopkins to a 1992 sketch sending up Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides.
Frank Sinatra
How can you argue with Ol’ Blue Eyes? Sinatra hosted the 1963 Oscars with aplomb, poking fun at Hollywood with a quip about how Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa might be greeted by producers: “You know, Leonardo, baby, I like it, I really like it.” The crooner also cohosted the 1974 Academy Awards alongside Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Hope, and Shirley MacLaine, and won an Oscar for best supporting actor in 1953 for his role in From Here to Eternity.
