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He may not win an Oscar for playing a rugged drover in the epic Australia, but Hugh Jackman will stand centre stage at February's 81st Academy Awards.
Jackman will host the show.
The Academy, searching for a way to halt sagging TV ratings for film's night of nights, dumped last year's host comedian Jon Stewart and hired showman and new Sexiest Man Alive Jackman.
Ratings for the US TV broadcast slumped 24 per cent last year.
"Hugh Jackman is a consummate entertainer and an internationally renowned movie star," Oscar telecast producer Laurence Mark and executive producer Bill Condon announced in a joint statement.
"He also has style, elegance and a sense of occasion.
"Hugh is the ideal choice to host a celebration of the year's movies and to have fun doing it."
Jackman received universal applause for hosting Broadway's Tony Awards three years straight from 2003 to 2005 where he used his singing, dancing and comedy chops to entertain the TV and live audience.
Jackman sang a duet with Aretha Franklin, joined the famous long-legged Rockettes for a high-kick dance routine and traded jokes with the A-List audience, including a comedy routine one year with Billy Crystal.
The Sydney-born actor was so good he won an Emmy for hosting the 2004 Tony Awards.
Ironically, Crystal, who last had the Oscar job in 2003, is the eight-time host who the Academy has had difficulty replacing.
They tried Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Rock in recent years, but all failed to live up to the high expectations.
Last year's three-hour Oscar broadcast hosted by Stewart hit a low 32 million viewers in the important US market, making it the least-watched Oscars ever.
Jackman's hiring was quickly praised, with the Los Angeles Times noting: "By opting for Jackman, a classy movie and theatre star instead of a big-mouth comic, Mark and Condon are signalling that they're trying to turn the Oscars into a party instead of the usual three-hour-plus cobwebby self-congratulatory snooze-athon".
The Jackman-hosted Academy Awards should have plenty of drama, with Heath Ledger the favourite to win a posthumous best supporting actor Oscar for his villainous portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight.
Jackman likely will not be a nominee.
Large-scale movies like Jackman's Australia are traditionally honoured with nominations by Academy voters, but the Baz Luhrmann-directed epic failed to score one nomination at Thursday's Golden Globes nomination ceremony.
The Globes are a reliable barometer for each year's Oscar nominations and winners.
Australia is likely to score a handful of technical nominations, with Mandy Walker a frontrunner for the cinematography award.
The Academy also announced today the visual effects team for Australia is one of 15 on the short-list for that category's Oscar, competing against the effects wizards behind films including The Dark Knight, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Iron Man, Quantum of Solace and The Spiderwick Chronicles.
The Oscar nominees will be announced on January 22 while Jackman will host the 81st Academy Awards ceremony on February 22 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
- AAP
