The producers of the Academy Awards announced that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will host the next Oscar ceremony, which means that you can blame me if it sucks. Earlier this year, while doing my traditional crabby TV-critic’s postmortem of the show after it made a Hugh Jackman of itself, I wrote:
Doing a reasonably entertaining Oscars isn’t rocket science. It’s not even paper airplane science. But it requires getting movie people to accept that they are putting on a TV show. Which means: get a TV person to host it, like Steve Martin—a movie guy, yes, but one who knows his way around a live-TV set, who has hosted the Oscars successfully before and who made me wish he and Tina Fey were co-hosting last night.
Well, now Martin is going to host, and Baldwin—he’s not Tina Fey, but he is in 30 Rock. I don’t know quite what to expect of Baldwin, and the choice of Martin is not as exciting as Ricky Gervais in the Golden Globes—but it’s as exciting as Oscar is reasonably going to get. Is that enough for you?