Queen Latifah to emcee AMAs

Queen Latifah is going back to the American Music Awards stage after a 30-year gap, but this time she is hosting alone on Monday, May 25, 2026. CBS and the American Music Awards announced that she will lead the 52nd show live from Las Vegas at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time. (paramountpressexpress.com) Her first turn as a host came on January 30, 1995, when she co-hosted the ceremony with Tom Jones and Lorrie Morgan at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. That makes the 2026 show a return to a job she last did when compact discs still dominated the music business. (imdb.com) The 2026 ceremony is set for the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and the American Music Awards says it is the largest venue the show has used. Tickets are already on sale through AXS, which means the event is being built as a full arena spectacle, not a studio-sized TV set. (theamas.com) This year’s show is also part of a bigger television shift. In October 2025, CBS and Dick Clark Productions announced a new five-year deal that brings the American Music Awards back to CBS and streams the show live on Paramount+. (theamas.com) That deal matters because the American Music Awards spent years moving around the television dial. The 1995 ceremony aired on American Broadcasting Company, while the 2026 ceremony will air on CBS, giving the show a new network home even as it leans on a familiar host from its earlier era. (imdb.com) (paramountpressexpress.com) The American Music Awards is a fan-voted show, and its official announcement says the 2026 broadcast will honor “the most influential artists and songs of today” across genres and generations. That format fits Queen Latifah unusually well because her career spans rap, singing, film, television, and producing rather than one lane of pop music. (theamas.com) CBS is also picking a host with a recent relationship to the network. Queen Latifah starred in and executive produced “The Equalizer,” which ran for five seasons on CBS before ending in 2025, so the network is putting one of its own recognizable faces at the center of a live holiday broadcast. (showbizjunkies.com) The timing is deliberate too. The show is scheduled for Memorial Day, Monday, May 25, which gives CBS a built-in holiday audience and turns the awards into event programming at the start of summer. (deadline.com) What has not been announced yet is almost everything else people usually tune in for. CBS and Dick Clark Productions said performers, presenters, and special honorees will be revealed in the coming weeks, so right now the host is the main piece of the 2026 rollout that is locked in. (deadline.com) So the pitch for this year’s show is pretty clear in the details already on the table: a 52nd annual ceremony, a holiday-night slot, a giant Las Vegas arena, a live CBS broadcast, and a host whose first American Music Awards appearance as emcee came three decades ago. The network changed, the city changed, and the host stayed famous long enough to come back as the familiar face of the whole night. (paramountpressexpress.com) (theamas.com)