Proving that you haven’t truly made a public spectacle until you’ve hosted the Oscars, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that actor and comedian Eddie Murphy will host the 84th Academy Awards on Sunday 26 February 2012. The awards will be produced by Brett Ratner and Don Mischer.
While this is the first time that Murphy has hosted the Oscars, he comes from a long line of comedians including Billy Crystal, Steve Martin and Whoopi Goldberg to host the awards ceremony in recent years. This move to a more “classic” host may be in response to the poor reception that younger hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway had at the 2010 awards.
Murphy’s professional career has been ironically quiet of late, largely appearing as the voice of Donkey in the series of Shrek films. He is set to appear later this year in Ratner’s Tower Heist and Brian Robbins’ A Thousand Words, in which a man learns he has a thousand words left to speak before he dies.
Murphy was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for Dreamgirls.
