When it comes to choosing a new host, the team behind the Oscars ceremony broadcast are right to be wary. Almost every effort they have made to introduce fresh blood in recent years has been poorly received.
Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s turn on the podium in 2013 was uneasily received (although it did attract the young male viewers the ABC network desired); likewise James Franco and Anne Hathaway’s notoriously shaky stint two years before.
Hence the tendency of the producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron to fall back on veterans such as Billy Crystal, who was coaxed into returning for a ninth appearance in 2012, and last year’s host, Ellen DeGeneres, who first took the job in 2007.
DeGeneres’s uncontroversial turn resulted in an 8% rise in ratings and an invitation to return in 2015 – as well as her star-studded selfie being the most shared tweet ever. When she refused, the producers reportedly courted the comedian-actor Chris Rock and Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus before finally deciding on a man even less familiar to an international audience.
But while Neil Patrick Harris might seem to the uninitiated like a leftfield pick, he’s a surprisingly savvy choice who ticks a lot of boxes.
At just 41, Harris is an industry veteran (rising to fame in the early 90s as TV’s teen doctor Doogie Howser MD), a bonafide Broadway star, an adept comic actor (see his darkly funny turn in Gone Girl) and a tried and tested MC, having hosted the Tony Awards four times before, to rave reviews.
His casting this year, then, recalls that of Hugh Jackman in 2009 – another multihyphenate with charm to burn, as at home on stage as on screen. His showstopping song-and-dance spectaculars at the Tonys have been his calling card; this year’s Oscars ceremony may therefore be more musical than most, with Harris himself set to perform a new number by the songwriters of the Frozen hit Let It Go.
Yet he is not a wholly safe choice. While Harris is perhaps best known to US TV audiences for playing a ladies’ man in the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother, off screen he is the father of two children with his husband, the actor David Burtka. This makes him the first gay married man to host the Oscars at a time when same-sex marriage is still a contentious topic in the US.
And if DeGeneres’s stock in trade is politically correct populism, Harris’s appeal sails closer to the wind. His credibility rests in part at least on his irreverence, and online he has appeared unwilling to play it safe, sharing near-the-knuckle gags about the lack of racial diversity in this year’s Oscars race with his 13 million Twitter followers.
With commercial break adverts for Sunday’s broadcast selling for record-breaking figures of close to $100m (£65m), the academy will be nervously waiting to see if they have finally made the right choice.
