How many times has Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Oscars? How did he do?

Follow the Oscars ceremony 2023 live online

The 95th Academy Awards are just a few weeks away, and a familiar face, Jimmy Kimmel, has agreed to return as host of the event for the third time. The late-night host had lent his abilities to the Oscars in hosted back-to-back ceremonies in 2017 and 2018.

A look back at Jimmy Kimmel’s role as host during the Academy Awards

Back in 2017, the first year Kimmel hosted the show was a few months after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. A divided time in the country called for a unifying Oscar host, and looking back at the review of the show, Kimmel delivered.

It is important to remember the time and place of these events. In 1968, the host of that year’s ceremony, Bob Hope, would be critiqued for how he addressed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, who had been killed in Memphis just days before.

At the 75th Academy Awards in March 2003, Michael Moore, whose ‘Bowling for Columbine’ won Best Documentary, and who used his speech to call out the Bush administration and its “fictitious” justification for the invasion of Iraq. The war had started three days before the ceremony, and some critics like David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun called out Hollywood for being so completely out of step with the rest of the world. “As the rest of the world saw televised images of captives and corpses identified as American soldiers, we watched host Steve Martin and a theater full of celebrities celebrating their self-importance,” said Zurawik.

When it was Jimmy Kimmel’s turn to host the Oscars for the first time, President Donald Trump had been in office for around a month. Writing a critique of the show for Variety, Sonia Saraiya said Kimmel “found a way to balance the telecast between that sensibility — the treacly self-satisfaction of sweeping orchestrals and tap-dancing starlets — and the very real widening gulf between the wealthy and cultured elites in Hollywood and the global public they make art for.” While the show did get political, with the host opting to address “Donald Trump’s tweets several times throughout the evening,” the ceremony was also an example of how “the arts and entertainment industry could be a force of good, without simply using that soapbox for soundbytes.”

However, not all critics were so positive in describing Kimmel’s performance. Daniel D’Addario, then writing for Time, said, “it was unfortunate that the evening’s host didn’t seem to share the evening’s general embrace of humanity, but, well, one can’t have everything.” D’Addario thought that Kimmel’s canned remarks were unoriginal and that his jokes were too linked to his own show and thus went over the audience’s head in many cases.

Regardless of the critics, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences invited Kimmel back again the following year to host again.... this time, as the ‘Me Too movement’ began to uncover the rampant abuse in Hollywood, Kimmel was back as host during a turbulent Oscars.

Some critics like Daniel Feinberg with the Hollywood Reporter thought that “he was good” and “better than last year,” but his performance fell flat overall.

Others were quite harsh with Kimmel.

CNN’s Brian Lowry joked that “if the intent was ultimately to maintain a celebratory tone without ignoring either the outside world or the elephant in the room throughout this year’s awards, host Jimmy Kimmel and the show itself largely succeeded.”

Daniel D’Addario remained unimpressed with the way in which the host tried to balance the politics going on in Hollywood and beyond. The writer knocked Kimmel, and the Academy, who in most cases help set the tone for the performers material, saying they had “had months to prepare for a show in the wake of the culture-shaking Harvey Weinstein revelations.”

“And he seemed to have spent those months brainstorming how not to address anything at all,” said D’Addario, who also applauded Kimmel’s “inspiring and catalyzing” monologues on his show when “discussing issues personally connected to him.”

This year the stakes feel lower. With the Trump presidency in the rearview mirror, Hollywood may feel more comfortable returning to a more standard ceremony where politics can be left at the door. How will Jimmy Kimmel perform under these conditions? Tune in on 12 March 2023 to find out.