Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson
A charisma overload, the nicest guy in Hollywood, the obvious choice. The script writes itself: a few skits where Dwayne has to interact with a puppet; a mild threat to challenge the best actor to a Hell in a Cell match; a bit where he brings a sick kid onstage to present one of the lowlier awards (best sound mix, something like that); standing ovation; gets the gig for the next 100 years. Job done.
Greta Thunberg
Rather than actors doing preachy-but-correct “CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL” acceptance speeches, it would have been easier to have Greta Thunberg host the entire thing, reading out haunting stats about extinction rates in between clips from Marriage Story. The only possible issue is that it takes two weeks to sail her over so … you know what, if we still have a planet in 2021, she can do it then.
JoJo Siwa
It’s about time the fusty old Academy shook things up a bit, and what better way than with a famous-but-only-on-YouTube-not-in-actual-reality 16-year-old with the intense energy of Every Blue Peter Presenter In History Distilled Into A Single Human Body? Her Oscars could open with a choreographed staircase dance number in full Joker face and end with her teaching a baffled Laura Dern how to floss. Zero-star reviews across the board.
A live de-aged Robert De Niro
It’s weird that Robert De Niro wasn’t nominated for his turn as 20-year-old-man-who-walks-like-an-80-year-old-man in Martin Scorsese’s infinity-length Netflix movie The Irishman. Still, all that de-ageing software is just lying around, so why don’t we have a throwback and let Raging Bull-era De Niro host? Might be nice for all the younger actors who only know him as “that guy who keeps swearing about the president” to learn why he’s even invited to these things in the first place.
A composite hologram decided by the Netflix algorithm
The future of Hollywood is a CGI rendering of Noah Centineo mashed with Cole Sprouse, acting opposite a Julia Garner–Millie Bobby Brown hybrid, for ever, so we may as well get ahead of the curve and just have a composite actor host. Maybe Netflix could add some spice by generating the face based on live data, so after a concerted Twitter effort, Making a Murderer’s Steven Avery gets to present best picture, or something. Don’t pretend you know enough about data to disprove this idea, because you don’t. We both know you don’t.
