From the Emmys to the Oscars: Jimmy Kimmel to host 2017 Academy Awards

By Christine Persaud Published December 5, 2016

Fresh off his Emmys hosting gig, Jimmy Kimmel has been tapped as emcee of another major ceremony: the Academy Awards, Variety says.

While this will be the talk show host’s first time hosting the Academy Awards, he has hosted the Emmys twice – most recently this year, as well as in 2012. Kimmel has also hosted the ESPYS (2007) and is a five-timer’s club member as an American Music Awards host.

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Kimmel has had success both times he hosted the Emmys, creating viral pranks, delivering witty jokes, and spewing insults at the television celebrities. At this year’s Emmy celebration, Kimmel kicked off the night with a hilarious opening skit that worked in a number of nominated shows. He got the most attention from the media, however, when he had the kids from the Netflix original series Stranger Things deliver brown-bagged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and juice boxes to the hungry attendees. Another noteworthy moment: When Matt Damon, with whom Kimmel has a longtime mock feud, came onstage to troll the host.

Beyond award shows, however, Kimmel is known for being able to create viral segments that have become so critical to television awards and talk shows in this day and age. Some of the most notable ones from his talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! include the Handsome Men’s Club, Mean Tweets, where celebrities read mean tweets written about them, and a Halloween bit where viewers are asked to submit videos where they trick their kids into thinking they ate all of their Halloween candy.

Kimmel has been a part of the ABC family for more than a decade — Jimmy Kimmel Live! has aired on the network since 2003. Prior to that, he was known for Comedy Central’s The Man Show and Win Ben Stein’s Money.

He will follow Chris Rock, who served as host of the 88th Academy Awards earlier this year. Rock’s jabs were focused mainly on the lack of diversity in the acting categories following the massive “Oscars so White” controversy that preceded the event. We’ll see what controversies Kimmel will have to contend with once the nominees are officially announced.

The 89th Academy Awards will air on ABC on Sunday, February 26.

Christine Persaud

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Christine has decades of experience in trade and consumer journalism. While she started her career writing exclusively about…

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What’s the state of the Academy Awards, 10 years after #OscarsSoWhite?

Lily Gladstone stares into the camera in a still from the movie Killers of the Flower Moon.

Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon Apple Original Films
It was the hashtag read round the world. “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” quipped lawyer and activist April Reign on January 15, 2015. She was tweeting about that morning’s Academy Award nominations — more specifically, about the fact that every one of the 20 actors recognized across four categories was white. Reign’s criticism would catch on quick, those three words spreading like wildfire across social media. Slower was the Academy to respond; it moved with the speed you might expect of an organization ambling towards its 90th birthday.
It all might have blown over if AMPAS didn’t once again fail, the very next year, to nominate a single performance by a person of color. One year of exclusively caucasian actors competing for the gold could be a glitch. But two, consecutively? That’s a pattern. The Academy had to face the music, which had grown louder than the kind it used to play rambling winners off the stage: The Oscars were so white — and as a close look at its voters revealed, so old and so male, too.
We’re now a decade out from Reign’s truth bomb and the backlash her hashtag inspired. Two cycles of bad press were enough to convince an embarrassed Academy that, yes, it had a diversity problem, which of course reflected a much larger problem in the industry and culture. (But wait, didn’t a past Oscar winner, Crash, solve inequality?) The solution to a rather demographically… homogeneous voting body was a major recruitment drive. AMPAS even set concrete goals for itself: By 2020, it would double the number of women and people of color in the organization. “The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up,” said president Cheryl Boone Isaacs in a statement.

Mahershala Ali in Moonlight A24
From a pure numbers perspective, this initiative has been a success. The Academy is objectively less white, male, and old today. It’s doubled its membership since 2015 — and in the process, met those ambitious growth goals. AMPAS isn’t just more inclusive. It’s also more cosmopolitan. In looking to shake up the makeup of its ranks, the group looked beyond Hollywood, and beyond the borders of the American film industry. Artists outside the States now account for at least 20% of the membership of this increasingly international group.
As the 10th anniversary of #OscarSoWhite passes, it’s worth asking: Has the diversification of the Academy also diversified the awards? More so than not, it’s helped. Since the PR nightmares of 2015 and 2016, we’ve yet to see another all-white slate of acting nominees. Which is not to say the Academy hasn’t come close to repeating that dubious feat yet again: In 2020, they made room only for Cynthia Erivo’s work in Harriet. And that same year was one of a couple from the past few when the Best Director lineup was made up entirely of men.
But on the matter of representation, there have been signs of progress, too. This past decade has seen historic nominations or wins for Muslim, Korean, Afro-Latina, Vietnamese, Native American, and Indigenous Mexican actors. Chloe Zhao became the first won of color (and only the second woman, period) to take home Best Director. And the 2019 ceremony could have been nicknamed #OscarsNotSoWhite, judging from the number of major awards that went to non-white performers and filmmakers — all leading up, ironically, to the bestowing of Best Picture upon a vintage white-savior movie, Green Brook.

Entertainment

7 greatest Oscar snubs of the last 10 years, ranked

Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner holding a piece of jewelry in Uncut Gems.

Not everyone can win an Oscar. Frankly, not everyone should win Oscars. That's why winning an Academy Award is arguably the highest honor one can win in the film industry. Getting nominated is a win in and of itself. With only a finite amount of nominees, there are bound to be snubs. Frankly, snubs is kind of an ugly term because it implies one actor, movie, or craftsperson deserves an award more than someone else. It's subjective, making it difficult to judge.

However, there are some glaring omissions in the Academy Awards' long history. Saving Private Ryan losing to Shakespeare in Love, Dances with Wolves defeating Goodfellas, and Hoop Dreams' failure to receive a documentary nomination are some of the more famous omissions in Oscar history. Some of these snubs even happened within the past decade. Here are the seven greatest Oscar snubs of the last 10 years.
7. 2015 - Whiplash and Boyhood lose to Birdman in Best Picture

Entertainment

All the 2025 Best Picture Oscar nominees, ranked

Timothee Chalamet stands near a desert wall in a still from the movie Dune: Part Two.

Los Angeles smolders, but the show must go on, apparently. Delaying no further, the Academy yesterday announced the nominees for the 2025 Oscars — one year to the day from the last time they unveiled the contenders in every category. No Barbenheimer looms over our new Oscar season, try though entertainment journalists and social media users did to manufacture a sequel to that double-feature moviegoing event for the ages. This week's nominations narrowed a crowded race without pointing towards a certain winner. The Best Picture lineup was tougher to predict than last year’s, which conformed so entirely to expectations that the 2024 version of this very article could be written entirely in advance.

Easier than identifying the frontrunner for this year’s Oscar is picking a favorite. Perhaps even more so than usual, Best Picture runs the gamut from worthy to decidedly not. The best of the nominees was truly the best movie of the year. The worst would make for a historically blunderous end to the 97th Academy Awards. In between, we’ve got blockbusters not half as good as the big winner of 2024, Oppenheimer; a better-than-average example of a generally lukewarm genre, the musical biopic; and a staggeringly ambitious budget epic whose reach exceeds its grasp (but hey, the reach is admirable all the same).