Rumors were flying fast and furious today that Ricky Gervais would be hosting the Oscars. I’d go for that! But the truth is that no decisions have been made yet.

“We haven’t made one single phone call,” Larry Mark, who was announced yesterday as a coproducer of the 81st Annual Academy Awards show with writer-director Bill Condon, told Yahoo’s Marc Malkin. “There has been no reaching out.”

Anything has to be better than last year’s telecast with host Jon Stewart (sorry, Stewart fans!). The show hit an all-time ratings low with just 32 million U.S. viewers, down 8 million from 2007.

Then again, a lot of that depends on which movies are nominated. “Hopefully, there will be films in contention this year that are of a more populist nature,” said Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

What?! He didn’t like last year’s winners, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood? Yeah, he says he liked them, but “all of them were kind of on the low side in terms of eyeballs.” Yeah, but indie and arthouse filmmakers everywhere were cheering like mad.

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