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And the winner is...Jon Stewart?

Hopes are high that intellectual funnyman Stewart can pull off an Oscar ratings coup--despite the absense of any blockbuster hits among nominees.

Jon Stewart hosts the Oscars this Sunday.

Screenwriter William Goldman once offered the famous Hollywood axiom, "In Hollywood, nobody knows anything." Nevertheless, every year, industry and media pundits act as if they know plenty, speculating not only about who will win an award, but also about how the Oscar host will fare.

This year, ABC and Oscar producer Gil Cates chose The Daily Show's Jon Stewart to handle hosting chores for the The 78th Annual Academy Awards Show, which airs Sunday, March 5. ABC hopes that having Stewart host the annual awards fest will give it a ratings boost.

The Daily Show averages 1.4 million viewers a night, many of them college-age and politically liberal. Stewart's take on the political landscape has earned the show multiple Emmy awards and the 2005 Thurber Prize for American Humor (for the Daily Show's America: The Book), but only time will tell if his brand of cerebral humor translates well to an Oscar audience of 40-50 million viewers from all over the political map.

Cates says he picked Stewart because "he's hip, he's with it, he's today." The move seems to indicate ABC wants to appeal to a younger audience, a tactic that has backfired in the past.

Last year, Chris Rock was hyped as a young, fresh voice who was going to bring in new audiences to the show, but the edgy SNL comedian drew flak when, prior to his appearance, he ribbed the Academy Awards in an interview by calling them "idiotic" and saying that "black people don't watch the Oscars." During the show, he mocked actor Jude Law and drew a humorless rebuttal from Sean Penn. Although there was a slight uptick in younger viewers, overall ratings for the telecast were down five percent from the year before, and Rock took the blame.

Even with good ratings, Hollywood doesn't always appreciate a joke directed at it. When late-night's David Letterman hosted the show in 1995, he performed a bizarre bit wherein he compared the names of Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey, repeating, "Uma, meet Oprah. Oprah, Uma. Uma, Op-rah." The show was the second-highest-rated broadcast in the past 15 years, but Letterman has not hosted a second time.

Letterman was not the first one-hit wonder who took aim at the establishment. When Chevy Chase hosted in 1988, he opened the show with, "Good evening, Hollywood phonies." Later, after the Academy cut short one winner's acceptance speech, Chase noted the awkward silence and quipped, "He said 'Thanks.'"

Sometimes, being good simply isn't enough to get ratings. In 2003, Steve Martin hosted to great reviews. Cates said Martin was "funny, classy, and literate." The telecast was the lowest rated since Neilsen began rating the show in 1974.

Even Oscar favorite Billy Crystal has had his ups and down. The highest-rated Oscar telecast in the last 15 years was 1998, a year Crystal hosted. He also hosted the 1990 show, which is one of the lowest rated in that time period. The difference? In 1998, the best picture winner was Titanic, the highest-grossing film of all time; in 1990, it was Driving Miss Daisy, which grossed a merely respectable $106 million.

The lack of blockbuster hits this year might have far more to do with any possible ratings slump than who is hosting the show. Together, the five best-picture nominees have collectively grossed around $230 million, just a tad more than the $222 million that 2004 Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King racked up in its first 10 days of release.

For his part, Stewart appears unflappable as the day approaches, telling the Associated Press, "I've bombed in front of many fine audiences filled with many talented people, and if this is that night, well, that's the way it goes."

Whatever the outcome, ABC is already crowing about the ad sales for the show. They have filled all of the available commercial space, and they fetched $1.7 million for the 30-second spots. Maybe somebody does know something.

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