Chris Rock is coming back to host next February’s Oscars, and it’s something of a high-risk move both for him and the Academy. Neil Patrick Harris seemed like a good idea at the time, and so did Seth MacFarlane. Yet they both disappointed: MacFarlane infuriated everyone with crass sexist humour. Harris was better, and everyone loved him for the game way he strode out on stage in his underpants, in homage to the famous moment in that year’s hit Birdman. But the ratings were down. In this era of frenzied social media comment, the Oscar host gig can create indelibly bad moments in your CV that it never used to in the era of Billy Crystal or Bob Hope.
Moreover, Rock doesn’t provide the shock of the new – he already hosted in 2005, when his cracks about Jude Law’s ubiquity got him into trouble. He’s a glorious, motormouth comic when he’s on form, and his standup shows can be brilliantly splenetic. There can’t be many Oscar hosts who have not merely riffed on the nightmare of their collapsing marriage but joked darkly about considering murder. (If you’ve never thought about it, said Rock, then you’ve never been in love. He was just kidding.) But his tough standup routine has always co-existed with sentimental Hollywood family movies such as Madagascar and Grown Ups. His movie Top Five was a kind of Larry David-ish attempt at celeb self-satire. Does all this make him a good fit for the Oscars?
I wonder. He’s a very funny guy and he makes a change to Hollywood’s perpetual display of white prestige. Yet every Oscar host must now face the Amy/Tina factor. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have been brilliant hosts for the Golden Globes – and that event itself has started in recent years itself to look sharper, smarter, more intimate: a cool revue-type show, compared to the deadly serious Oscars in a cavernous theatre. Ellen DeGeneres herself was an excellent Oscar host the year before Harris. Female comics and female sensibilities have been more successful in the host persona: more approachable and less macho. When Anne Hathaway co-hosted with James Franco, she seemed far more sympathetic. Everyone has been hoping that Fey and Poehler could be persuaded to step up and do the Oscars, but they might be fighting shy of that. And DeGeneres might not want to box herself in by doing it.
So Rock is to take another sip of the poisoned chalice. Part of him will naturally want to tear the whole ego-fest to shreds, but of course he’s enough of a professional to know how badly that would play, and he’s invested in the ego-fest himself. So he must find a middle way, a manner which teases affectionately and keeps the sharp jabs coming. I suspect he won’t want to do many big stunts or musical spoofs. It’s the usual balancing act. Rock will do a bang-up, professional job. But I’m not especially looking forward to seeing it – and I suspect he’s not much looking forward to doing it.
