Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd named as producers for the 89th Academy Awards

In an era in which critiquing the Academy Awards in real time has become a kind of social-media bloodsport, signing on to produce the Oscars telecast is not for the faint of heart — and that may be especially true in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite firestorm that roiled last year’s awards season.

But for veteran movie producers Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd, who were announced on Friday as the producers of the 89th Academy Awards telecast, the prospect of taking the reins of the film industry’s biggest night was too exciting to resist.

“I’ll be honest with you: We shamelessly chased it,” De Luca said by phone following the announcement. “We’re movie fanatics and it’s been kind of a dream of ours to be in consideration for this.”

Their top priority: bringing a sense of lightness and nostalgia back to a show that has recently become freighted with political overtones. “We know we want a fun tone,” De Luca said. “In watching past telecasts, I like when there’s a lot of humor and a lot of nods to the past in terms of inspiration.”

While this is their first involvement with the Oscar telecast, De Luca and Todd, who have been friends for more than 25 years, each bring to the job extensive resumes as film producers.

A former studio executive at Sony Pictures, DreamWorks and New Line Cinema, De Luca earned best picture nods for producing “Captain Phillips,” “Moneyball” and “The Social Network” and is credited on more than 60 films, including “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.”

Todd — who is president of the Pearl Street Films production company, founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — has produced such films as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Memento” and the “Austin Powers” comedies. She earned an Emmy nomination for her work on the HBO television movie “If These Walls Could Talk 2.”

While previous Oscar producers have come from varying backgrounds — the team of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who produced the telecast three out of the last four years, were steeped in musical theater — Todd says she and De Luca are bound by a shared “geeky love of movies.”

“This is something we’ve talked about for a very long time,” said Todd, who is the second woman to produce the Oscars after the late Laura Ziskin. “‘If we ever got the opportunity to do it, we wouldn’t do that, we’d do this, we’d want to work with these people.’ We want it to be entertaining and a celebration of what we all feel lucky we get to do with our lives.”

February’s Oscar telecast, which was hosted by Chris Rock and produced by Reginald Hudlin and David Hill, was largely dominated by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, with numerous barbs throughout the show addressing the lack of nominations for any actors of color for the second year in a row. (“I’m here at the Oscars, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards,” Rock joked sharply in his opening monologue.) Coming in the wake of calls by some for a boycott of the show, ratings for the telecast hit an eight-year low.

In recent months, the academy has taken dramatic steps toward diversifying its own membership ranks. In July, the nearly 90-year-old institution invited its largest, most diverse class of new members ever, opening its doors to 683 industry professionals from around the world, 46% of them female and 41% people of color.

De Luca says he and Todd want the next telecast to celebrate diversity and excellence within the film industry and, more broadly, pay tribute to the role movies play in people’s lives.

“The movies have been with you and provided escape when you needed escape — and I need a little escape after this two-year election cycle,” De Luca said. “We want to inspire people with memories of what a best friend the movies have been over the course of their life, and we want to have a lot of laughs. Get in, get out. No homework. All joy.”

To that end, the first task for the producers — and one of the most critical — will be to line up a host for the show. In past years, Oscar hosts have often been named in November, so Todd and De Luca have little time to spare.

“We’re starting to put our fantasy list together,” De Luca said. “It’s going to lean heavily on funny people. With hosts and presenters, we want people that can riff, that can come up with one-liners. Obviously the show is scripted but we also want to be spontaneous and we want people that can roll with that kind of spontaneity and be entertaining and funny.”

Ultimately, of course, the tone of the show — and to some extent the ratings as well — will be determined in large part by the nominations themselves, which are entirely out of the producers’ hands.

But whichever way those chips fall, De Luca and Todd say they will approach the show in the same spirit of celebration.

“You’re a little bit at the mercy of the nominations, but we’re approaching this with an absolute absence of cynicism,” De Luca said. “As much as the show gets criticism — sometimes warranted but most of the times not in my opinion — to me, it’s a completely uncynical enterprise. … Obviously we’re there to celebrate the nominees and present them with awards, but in a way what the Academy Awards represents is bigger than any one year and any one collection of nominated films and nominated people.”

josh.rottenberg@latimes.com

josh.rottenberg@latimes.com

Twitter: @joshrottenberg