Why Jimmy Kimmel isn't the perfect Oscars host for 2018 in Hollywood

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced last May that Jimmy Kimmel would return to host the 2018 Oscars, the entertainment world was not, as it is now, on fire. Back then, a news item trumpeting Harvey Weinstein's production of "The Louis B. Mayer Story" starring Kevin Spacey, written by James Toback and directed by Brett Ratner would belong in Variety, not The Onion. It was a pre-Reckoning world.

Alas, what felt like a fair reward for Kimmel's poised handling of the 2017 ceremony's Best Picture misnaming snafu last February now plays as excruciatingly tone deaf. The optics alone are galling: In the midst of an ongoing scandal that has outed some of Hollywood's biggest stars and most feared powerbrokers as serial sexual predators, is the Academy seriously going to stand by the former co-host of "The Man Show"?

To be fair, the Kimmel of 1999 (when "The Man Show" premiered on Comedy Central) was a far cry from the compassionate and socially conscious Kimmel of today. And while your memory of "The Man Show" may be heavily (and, to a degree, rightfully) tainted by the shamelessly objectified Juggy Dance Squad and the recurring "Girls on Trampolines" segment, Kimmel and co-host Adam Carolla were at least self-aware enough to goof on the boorishness and ignorance their program ostensibly sought to celebrate. It's a relic of a thankfully bygone time, but the show didn't become truly toxic until Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope took it over in 2003.

Kimmel has evolved a great deal since then. He's now in his 15th year of hosting "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on ABC, and while he's still plenty acerbic, "The Man Show" material is now in mothballs (e.g., he no longer dons blackface to do his impersonation of an egregiously dimwitted Karl Malone). He's safe. He's had President Barack Obama on his show more than once. He became an important voice for the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act when, shaken by his newborn son Billy's battle with congenital heart disease, he used his late night show's opening monologue to challenge Congressional Republicans who sought to kill it. He also delivered a conscience-stricken excoriation of President Trump and Republicans in Congress for their NRA-directed inaction in the wake of the Parkland school shooting.

Jimmy Kimmel seems to be a pretty decent liberal, which made him a pretty decent choice to host a Hollywood awards show before everything suddenly, necessarily went haywire. Now, through no fault of his own, he will take the stage as an emblem of the industry's fierce resistance to change. The world has been turned upside down, but the Oscars are inexplicably sticking with the goofy white guy.

The gender and ethnicity of the Oscars host might sound like a quibble all told, especially when you consider the AMPAS's steady progress in diversifying its membership (it's never been less of an old white person's club ). But after sitting through 2018's rapid succession of white-dude-emceed awards shows, the decision to retain Kimmel feels more wrongheaded than ever. Seth Meyers struggled mightily as the host of the Golden Globes, while James Corden crashed and burned at the Grammys by being James Corden. If any white male comic could have navigated these choppy waters, it's Meyers, who has been the class of late night when it comes to satirizing post-Weinstein Hollywood. But when he farmed out a portion of his opening monologue to women and people of color in the ballroom (borrowing a bit from his NBC show), he gave up trying to make it work and instead pointedly savaged his presence on the stage. From that point forward, the message was clear: It's not that he wasn't up to the task; it's that, by Meyers' own admission, the task shouldn't have been his in the first place.

The same goes for Kimmel and then some. He's not standing for the Hollywood Foreign Press (a 90-member group of swag-happy journalists that holds as much sway on studios' diversity practices as your local 4-H branch); he's representing Hollywood full stop. Regardless of intent, Hollywood doesn't need to hear a funny white man's thoughts on its current state of turmoil. There's been almost 100 years worth of that, thank you very much. An easy fix would've been to bring back a known quantity like Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock or Whoopi Goldberg; a gutsier choice would have been a less familiar face like Samantha Bee, Tig Notaro or Leslie Jones.

This isn't just about how Hollywood sees itself; it's about how the rest of the world sees Hollywood. This Academy of artists, who operate from a place of passion and empathy, was presented with a prime opportunity to lead the way at a time when much of the country feels leaderless. Unfortunately, the Academy's leadership blew it.