The Academy Awards Ceremonies

Needless to say, the best Academy Award Ceremonies of all time are the ones when an established comedian hosts the show. As far as a pure comedians, Bob Hope and Johnny Carson were by far the best. In my opinion Billy Crystal is 3rd best because he performed singing and dancing during this many times as host of the Oscars as well as telling jokes and because of the singing I didn't consider him a pure comedian Oscar host, which is unfortunate.

Everybody agrees that The Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosted Oscars was the worst ever and a very bad idea in 2011 and what the Academy was thinking that year nobody will ever know, but this is a mistake that I am sure they will not make again.

An interesting twist to the Oscar show was in 2010 where an actor Alec Baldwin and a pure stand up comedian Steve Martin hosted the show that year. I thought overall they did well, but also thought that the show would have better only with Steve Martin as the host and Steve did host the show twice years earlier and did a great job. I rank Steve Martin as the fourth best host in Oscar history right behind Billy Crystal.

The bottom line about Oscar night is that a great deal of the show is very boring and you really need a very funny comedian to make the show worth watching, so every year they make bad choice for the host of the show I know I am in for a very long night.

Last year in 2014 Ellen Degeneres did a very good job hosting the Oscars and the highlight of that evening was the moment when she gathered all the actors together to take the selfie picture and then attempted to as she put it, "Bring down the internet". Three and one half million tweets later and the word was that they were successful at least temporarily in breaking the internet. I rank Ellen Degeneres as the fourth best Oscar host of all time.

Now that the 2015 Oscar show has been aired I would say that it was not a good show and definitely not funny enough as the host Neil Patrick Harris did a very average job and him coming out on stage in his underpants was just tacky and weird at best. The viewing audience was also down 7 million from last year and in my opinion it was because they did not choose a great comedian to host the show.

A fantastic choice for next years Academy Awards show would be Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler as they were just plain great 3 years in a row on the Golden Globes show.

This year Neil Patrick Harris will be the host of the Oscars, and while I think he will be a good host I was disappointed that he will be hosting because once again a pure stand up comedian will not be hosting the show again and in my opinion only a great stand up comedian should host the Oscars. One rather amazing exception to this rule was in 1995 when David Letterman hosted and for the most part, for reasons unknown it didn't go too well. I thought David Letterman did OK, but like everybody else I was rather surprised that many of his jokes kind of fell flat, especially the one he did about Oprah Winfrey and Uma Thurman at the start of the show.