The most thankless job in Hollywood: Why Jimmy Kimmel, John Mulaney don’t want to host the Oscars

Jimmy Kimmel hosting the 2018 Oscars. Photo / Getty Images

Who’d be an Oscars host? As of this week, the answer is, seemingly, no one. Organisers of the 2025 ceremony have reportedly reached out without success to the widely-liked Jimmy Kimmel, who has handled it four times in recent years, and managed to boost the ratings up to pre-pandemic levels back in March.

We’re told, though, that Kimmel is done with it. They’re lucky he even agreed four times. In 2019 he described the gig as “kind of a f**king nightmare”, and fair enough, really: after all, this is the same Jimmy Kimmel who had to deal on stage with the 2017 envelope mix-up that saw La La Land incorrectly announced as Best Picture, and the Will Smith slap in 2022. Plus, although the 19.5 million viewers this year doubled the all-time low – 9.85 million in 2021 – that’s a far, far cry from the 57 million who tuned in to watch Titanic sweep back in 1998.

The elite glamour of the Oscars may be undiminished, but if these ratings are anything to go by, we still haven’t climbed out of an ongoing phase where they’re perceived as an exclusive back-slapping exercise for Hollywood’s cronies. If so few in the outside world are interested, is it worth anyone’s while to host them any more?

The sense of the gig being a poisoned chalice – and one crafted from fool’s gold – has only been kept at bay lately by Kimmel’s unflappability. This year, he admits he was buoyed by the popularity of Barbie and Oppenheimer, so at least his jokes would land with a majority of the seated crowd. Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the upcoming season, and foreseeing only a load of tumbleweed.

A Kimmel vacancy didn’t sound like such a huge problem until the mordant stand-up comedian John Mulaney, a fan favourite whom everyone had earmarked as a blindingly obvious successor, also decided he’d rather chew off his own fist than step up. Mulaney went viral at this year’s ceremony for his delightfully unexpected bit about the mad plot of Field of Dreams, a Best Picture nominee in 1990. It was a glorious cameo, but pressure-free – unlike hosting the whole shebang.

Mulaney did also present the Academy’s Governor’s Awards in January, and did such an assured, funny, and perfectly-pitched job that his opening monologue practically felt like an audition reel. (Highlights included: a recollection of his 12-year-old self “finally seeing himself on screen” when he came across Angela Bassett’s character in Waiting to Exhale, and the expression “it’s an honour and a favour” about agreeing to host.)

Evidently, neither Kimmel nor Mulaney think there’s much upside in lending a hand next time: another ratings slump looks written in the stars. The trouble is, these are not isolated demurrals in the fraught world of awards hosting. The 76th edition of the Emmys, due to air on September 16, still lacks a compere. (Past hosts include Kimmel in 2016, Andy Samberg in 2015, and Anthony Anderson last year.)

Comedian John Mulaney is also said to have turned down the Oscars job. Photo / Getty Images

It’s hardly surprising that the next Golden Globes, scheduled for January, haven’t made a choice yet. Last year, both Chris Rock and Beef star Ali Wong turned the gig down and the comedian Jo Koy was picked with only two weeks’ notice. The panicky last-ditch hire goes some of the way to explaining why he seemed so dismally prepared, delivering a performance best summed up by the gritted teeth emoji. (Lowlights included: a laboured joke at Taylor Swift’s expense that found her failing to smile while the rest of the room cringed, and a run of sexist Barbie gags so poorly delivered that the camera caught Selena Gomez with her head in her hands.)

The Globes used to oscillate between the pairing of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (daft luvvie love-in, often delightful) and the five infamous stints by Ricky Gervais (hellfire roasting of A-listers, taken right to the edge). But no one has come up with a replacement concept there that works. Koy’s panned appearance came a year after the nearly-as-weak Jerrod Carmichael, who turned viewers off with tasteless gags about Whitney Houston.

Trying too hard might be the ultimate sin for an MC at one of these functions. But it’s the material that lets them down, time and again. Billy Crystal hosted the Oscars nine times and was always a joy to watch, not just because you felt the love in the room bouncing off him – and being reciprocated – but because the scripts were so well-oiled. Kimmel’s writers have left him high and dry on quite a few occasions: he has a knack for shrugging off the odd dud, though, and briskly getting to the next bit.

His average-to-good hit rate has done the job lately – which is more than can be said for some of the notorious options they experimented with before him. When James Franco and Anne Hathaway jointly compered in 2011, the whole business was like watching an awkward prom date broadcast across the world: peers with zero chemistry, grinning fakely to get through it and wondering why they’d agreed.

Seth MacFarlane backstage at the Academy Awards. Photo / Getty Images

Even worse was the horribly incongruous Seth Macfarlane in 2013, bringing his Marmite brand of smirking frat humour up on stage, and singing the infamous We Saw Your Boobs to the likes of a suddenly-migraine-afflicted Charlize Theron. Macfarlane, who knew he was in for a pasting, wasn’t surprised when the organisers couldn’t find anyone to host in 2019, calling it “kind of a dusty format” where the expectation to stay tasteful can be crushingly intense.

That year and in 2020, the Oscars went host-free – in the latter case after someone dug up homophobic tweets from Kevin Hart, and cancelled him right out of wanting to do it. The host-free ceremony is shorter, but feels longer – hardly bringing the event accessibly into our living rooms or combatting the idea that it’s a shameless industry love-in.

If volunteers to host it “nicely” have started to treat the whole enterprise as a sinking ship, you have to wonder at what point the Academy will take more drastic measures. With an iceberg dead ahead, it could be time to heave a deep breath, smash the glass, and yank down hard on the emergency ripcord marked “Gervais”.