This year’s Oscars nominations will be announced by rising stars Rachel Sennott and Bowen Yang.
The pair are both actors, writers and comedians and will be hopeful that the early-morning hosting gig from Los Angeles isn’t their last association with the Academy Awards.
The Connecticut-born Sennott, 29, studied at NYU and has been a fixture of the New York comedy scene since 2016, both on Twitter and at alt-comedy shows. In 2018 she played the lead role in Emma Seligman's short film Shiva Baby and earned further critical praise when she reprised the part for the feature film adaptation in 2020.
In a four-star review of the film for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey wrote that Sennott, who was already known for her “ultra-cool social media presence [blending] aspirational self-love and feverish neuroticism,” felt “perfectly pitched” as the high-strung young woman at the heart of the film.
Since then, Sennott has starred in a string of critically acclaimed indie hits, including the Gen Z slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies opposite Pete Davidson (which also earned a four-star review) and teen fight club comedy Bottoms, alongside The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri (dubbed “cynical, cool and hysterically weird”).
She was most recently seen in Jason Reitman’s comedy Saturday Night, about the first ever taping of Saturday Night Live, playing real-life Seventies SNL comic Rosie Shuster.
Yang, meanwhile, is a Saturday Night Live star of the modern era. Born in Brisbane, Australia, he moved with his family to Montreal, Canada and then Aurora, Colorado while still a child. He also attended NYU where he met fellow comedian Matt Rogers. The pair have hosted the culture podcast Las Culturistas together since 2016.
In 2018, Yang was hired as a writer by Saturday Night Live and was promoted to featured player the following year. He became the show’s first-ever Chinese-American cast member and only the third gay male cast member. His skits and performances have frequently made headlines, with his turn as pygmy hippo Moo Deng going viral last year. During last weekend’s episode, he was seen hugging Dave Chappelle after the pair had reportedly fallen out over Chappelle’s outspoken views on trans rights.
As an actor, Yang appeared in the 2022 queer romcom Fire Island and most recently played a supporting role in Wicked, which is tipped to be one of the films to garner the most nominations at this year’s Oscars.
It will be up to Yang and Sennott to reveal whether Wicked does indeed lead the way when they take the stage at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills to announce the nominations in all 23 Academy Award categories at 5:30am local time tomorrow morning.
