The 94th Academy Awards, scheduled to air on ABC March 27, will be the first since the 90th, in 2018, to have a host.
“You heard it here first,” Craig Erwich, president Hulu Originals & ABC Entertainment, said during ABC’s portion of the Television Critics Association virtual press tour on Tuesday.
It was announced earlier Monday that Glenn Weiss will direct the Oscars telecast — his seventh consecutive time doing so — with Will Packer serving as producer.
Jimmy Kimmel, ABC’s resident late night talker, hosted the Oscars in 2017 and 2018, with 26.62 million people tuning in for the latter telecast. Ratings for 2019’s hostless Oscars actually rose to 29.56 million, before falling in 2020 to 23.64 million and then plummeting last year to 10.40 million.
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Tom Holland, the star of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the biggest blockbuster of the pandemic, expressed interest in hosting the Oscars, and THR has learned that the Academy did reach out to him to explore that possibility.
