Chris Rock has confirmed he'll be the next Academy Awards show host. He previously hosted the 2005 broadcast.
Ratings for this year's show, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, fell some 16% leading to the installment of two new producers in September: television veteran David Hill (American Idol) and Reginald Hudlin (NAACP Image Awards). Hudlin is also an experienced director who helmed the pilot episode for Rock's TV show Everybody Hates Chris, so presumably that means he already has a good working relationship with Rock.
Rock himself just directed the comedy special Amy Schumer Live at the Apollo, which aired last weekend, and also wrote, directed and starred in last year's comedy Top Five. But he's best known as a live performer, so he sounds like a natural choice to try and give the show new life. The Academy Awards telecast is notoriously difficult to produce and host, as much as anything because it draws so much worldwide attention and because much of it is, apparently, inherently unwieldy. We can only hope that the new producer can grab hope of this wild animal of a show, and get a smart, funny host like Chris Rock.
Here are excerpts from Rock's opening monologue at the 2005 Oscars:
During the show, he also did a very funny pretaped bit, featuring interviews with moviegoers:
But he also joked about Jude Law, making fun of how many roles the actor was snaring, which provoked the ire of some and a humorless rejoinder from Sean Penn during the broadcast:
Six years before that, Rock made a brief, lightly controversial impression when presenting the Sound Effects Editing Academy Award:
More recently, he was quite funny when presenting the Best Animated Feature in 2012:
He can also be quite distinguished (and funny), as here when he honored Harry Belafonte:
The 88th Academy Awards will be presented on February 28, 2016.
