Feedback: Let’s talk Chris Rock for Oscars host pick

Art is on wall, not on your cellphone

On a busy Saturday, as I stand in the plaza at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art working as a docent guide, I find it hard to engage with the guests as they are all buried in their cellphones or mobile devices [“Tap and Tour,� Oct. 25]. If you want to look at art on a tiny screen, you should stay home. The whole experience of coming to a museum is to see the art up close and personal. One of the greatest pleasures — and certainly treasures — in the world is to go to a museum and actually see the art hanging on a wall or sculptures standing right in front of you. I’ll never get tried of that, and I think we should teach a whole new generation not to tire of that either.

Sherry Davis, Playa Vista

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Yays, nays for Oscars host pick

As a die-hard Chris Rock fan, I was both elated and trepidatious to read that he would host the 2016 Oscars [“Chris Rock: Right Man for a Race-Aware Moment,� Oct. 22]. Rock has demonstrated over many years (and many different media) that he is a brilliant and incisive critic of just about everything — from marriage to sex to racism to politics — and a really funny guy.

Unfortunately, on his last outing at the Oscars, he appeared to have been muzzled.

Hopefully, this go-round, the film academy is prepared to embrace fully Rock’s brand of brilliance. Otherwise, why bother wasting his time and ours?

Evelyn Baran, Beverly Hills

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Yawn. I wish the academy and the TV producers they hire would stop this obsessive need to lure twenty- and thirtysomethings to tune in.

That age group knows nothing. If the show is good, EVERYONE will tune in.

Rock, like all the other recent hosts, will tell a joke, give a very, very slight grin to hear the response, then move onto the next joke (yawn).

The academy and the TV producers should have hired Bette Midler to host the show. She’s got class and sass.

Louis Jacinto, Los Angeles

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I’m wondering, when was the last time the Oscars were hosted by a Latin American?

Ray Sherman, Duarte

Forget the rest, Conan’s the best

Shame on Mary McNamara for omitting the funniest and most talented of all late-night talk show hosts, Conan O’Brien [“At Last, Something to Keep Everyone Awake at Night,� Oct. 2]. He should be the rightful host of “The Tonight Show,� not Jimmy Fallon. Fallon is very talented but seems very uncomfortable as a talk show host, sometimes borderline brown-nosing guests. O’Brien, on the other hand, is a natural, so much funnier, with much better writers, musicians and sidekick in Andy Richter.

Steve Vickery, Santa Barbara

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