NEWS FLASH: Ellen DeGeneres to Host Oscars

Ellen DeGeneres hosts the primetime Emmy awards on November 4, 2001. Photo by Michael Caulfield of wireimage.com.



Did you hear me scream this morning?

After years of hoping, my wish has come true. Ellen DeGeneres will be hosting the Oscars.

Huzzah!

Ms. DeGeneres's hosting credentials are two gigs at the primetime Emmy awards, as well as her perennially daytime Emmy-winning talk show. Her HBO standup specials have all been great. She's going to be awesome.

She is also only the second woman to host the show in its 79 years.

Ms. DeGeneres is the third consecutive first-time host; it looks more and more promising each year that the era of the same damn people hosting all the time is over. Billy Crystal is great, but he has done his thing, his status as a classic host is secured, so hooray for the newblood.

By the way, can you name what Ellen DeGeneres and her predecessor, Jon Stewart, have in common? If you said her brother Vance DeGeneres was a correspondent on Stewart's The Daily Show, pat yourself on the back.

Oscar Hosts: A Look Back

I have been watching the Oscars since the 66th awards (held in 1994), and the only host I haven't liked is Whoopi Goldberg. You thought I was going to say David Letterman, didn't you? Letterman may have been out of place in '95, but he was fantastically out of place, and I'll take his smart-ass shenanigans over Goldberg's not-updated-since-Clinton-was-elected routine any day. Letterman was also responsible for my favorite filmed segment ever, the "Would You Like to Buy a Monkey?" audition reel. Another of my all-time favorites was Chris Rock's interviews at the Magic Johnson Theatre in L.A., asking "regular" people if they had seen any of the Best Picture nominees. By the way, what do these two bits have in common? If you answered "Albert Brooks," pat yourself on the back.

Speaking of Chris Rock, he is another unjustly maligned host. I think people were so certain (and possibly eager) he was going to fail, that they overreacted to his every joke. Any reasonably intelligent person who has been watching this show for a few years would recognize that his so-called "barbs" at Jude Law and Tobey Maguire were no more pointed than any other cracks previous hosts have made about their peers.

My favorite hosts have been David Letterman, Steve Martin, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart. What do they all have in common? If you answered they have the irreverence, absurdity, and biting wit necessary to cut through the opulence and ass-kissing of Oscar pageantry, pat yourself on the back.