2010 Oscar Hosts – Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin

Let’s take a look at the chequered history of Oscar hosts as the Oscar betting season gathers momentum.

This isn’t the first time that the Academy has chosen more than one person to host the Oscars. There was a trend for multiple Oscars hosts at the start of the seventies and the start of the ‘eighties, and 1988 the Academy decided to turn the thing on its head entirely by having no host at all.

They had no host either at the end of the sixties, presumably out of a nod to the counter-culture and fighting the power. In the greed-is-good ‘eighties, odds are the absence of a host was more about not paying the extra salary.

The effortlessly urbane Hugh Jackman did nothing wrong during his tenure last year, but Jackman’s Wolverine schtick turns off the intellectuals and the Marvel demographic care little for soft-shoe shuffles and lullabies of Broadway. Oscar ratings continue to fall so the producers have decided to ditch Jackman roll the dice with Martin and Baldwin for Oscars 2010.

Steve Martin has presented the Oscars twice before, in 2001 and 2003, but it’s hard to remember anything particularly memorable he did. Crystal and Jackman both did some singin’ and some dancin’ – couldn’t Martin have brought his banjo at least?

Alec Baldwin is the edgier choice, and there can be little doubt that part of the reason that he was chosen is the hope that people will tune in to see if the famously volatile Baldwin goes off. But Baldwin has softened his edge and reinvented himself since he went to 30 Rock on TV and is now a Hollywood elder statesman. He’ll be effortlessly charming, but the chances of fireworks are low.

Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal defined the Oscars for their generations – two generations, in the case of Hope. The new century is still waiting for Crystal’s true successor, and it’s unlikely to be the Martin/Baldwin double act. But it would be neither just nor fair to speak of Oscar hosting without mentioning a moment of magic from the English actor David Niven, a man who co-hosted the Oscars three times, and even won one, in 1958, during a show he himself co-hosted.

Niven was one of four co-hosts (John Huston, Diana Ross and Burt Reynolds being the other three) for the 46th Academy Awards in 1974. During the presentation a man called Robert Opel streaked the stage when Niven was introducing Elizabeth Taylor. Niven took the chance to deliver one of the greatest ad-libs in history: “Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”