At Least We Don't Have To Watch Hugh Jackman And Ryan Reynolds Host the Oscars This Year

Good news is in short supply at the moment. Whenever I turn to my phone or computer to distract myself I’m hit with a flurry of reminders that the worst is yet to come. There’s no lying down because of that! There’s no stopping. The fight is going to continue. Still, a little good news would be nice. Something decent has to be happening or, in this case, not happening.

Lemme preface this by saying that I enjoy Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds. They are both good actors when they try. The snag is that one tries significantly harder than the other (but the other used to! I think). Their little friendly feud is fun, and I was genuinely excited for Deadpool Ampersand Wolverine. I’m the father to young twins, and am tired and busy all the time but still ensured I saw it opening weekend. I thought it was okay! What annoyed me the most was I thought it could have been great.

The team-up superhero flick had two A-list actors with great chemistry, characters with rich cinematic history, and all the excitement imaginable. It wasn’t announced the two would be teaming up until almost two years before the release (exactly two years at the time, but the film was moved up). They had time to polish the script and offer something more substantial than your run-of-the-mill comic book movie. Instead, we wound up with twenty-plus minutes of expositional gobbledygook.

Any scene with Matthew Macfayden wore the film down, and how dare any production force me to write a sentence like that. The emotional core at the heart of the film, two characters looking for love and acceptance but unable to accept they have it in each other could be powerful stuff, especially when applied to Jackman and Reynolds! I didn’t want Logan, but Spider-Man: No Way Home is the standard of quality for films attempting to tie up multiple decades of continuity across multiple movies.

Jackman and Reynolds played it safe and made a bunch of money. That’s exactly what they would do for the Oscars. Recently, Reynolds was asked by Deadline about the buzz surrounding the possibility of the two hosting the show. “I love how you skipped past the other headline: ‘Giant Bag Of Blood Ryan Reynolds Fails Again,’ ” Reynolds quipped. “The Oscars, yes. This is something I really genuinely would love to do with Hugh. Yeah, we hosted Kimmel together, but we also had just kind of hit, ‘F*k it’ at that point, we were at the end of a long tour. We traveled in every country all over the world, and enjoyed every second of it. And we go to Kimmel, we didn’t even remember the schedule, (as it was) so intense on the tour like that. And so we got to Kimmel, and we just got loose. And it was, I thought, kind of an interesting way to host it.”

If that answer feels a bit ramble-y, don’t worry, he wasn’t done! “It feels like those old AFI dinners where everybody would get up there — they go from decades and decades ago all the way up to present day. And they look like what you sort of hope the Oscars could feel like, right? A bit of a roast, a bit of a loose kind of enjoyable experience,” Reynolds explained I guess. “And, you know, it’s getting harder and harder out there, I think, for telecasts like that to kind of exist, it’s tricky. So, one day I’d love to do that, I don’t know about this year, but one day, yeah.” What? Live television is, arguably, one of the few things keeping TV alive!

I don’t expect Reynolds to have a pocket answer to this question, but he says a lot to say a little. The interviewer then presses him again and he goes on to basically say that, since the things he does are all consuming but he also wants to be there with his kids, he has to pick and choose what he does. He says that the Oscars specifically would make it hard to be present at home as he’d be spending that time thinking of jokes. I don’t know Ryan Reynolds, but, for someone who says he’d love to one day host the Oscars, it sounds like he doesn’t want to one day host the Oscars.

That’s perfectly fine! If he hosted the Oscars with Jackman they’d likely play it even safer than they did with their buddy superhero movie, a place where they could have done whatever they wanted and still get adulation hurled at them. But, when you’re more brand than actor, ya gotta protect that image at all costs.