Keke Palmer, Lil Wayne, Charlamagne tha God, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, David Alan Grier, Raven-Symoné and Grandmaster Flash are all getting stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce announced the 32 members of the Class of 2027 on Thursday at a press conference at Funko Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard, with Walk of Famers Ming Na Wen and Sheila E. reading the names alongside Chamber President and CEO Ron Frierson. The honorees are spread across six categories. Elba and Lindo landed in Motion Pictures, Grier, Palmer and Raven-Symoné in Television, Joseph Saddler, better known as Grandmaster Flash, and Lil Wayne in Recording, and Charlamagne in Radio.
Keke Palmer made the loudest noise about it. She posted a video of herself on the phone getting the news, still processing it in real time, and wrote that she could not believe the call she had just received. She thanked the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, her team, and the people who built her up, then turned the moment over to her family. This star belongs to all of us, she wrote. It lands as the kind of full circle moment her career has been building toward since she was a kid in Akeelah and the Bee, through True Jackson VP, Hustlers, Nope, her Broadway run as Cinderella and now a podcast, Baby This Is Keke Palmer, that has become one of the more reliable places to get a real conversation out of a famous person.
Lil Wayne’s inclusion in the Recording category is the one that will spark the most conversation, because there is an argument to be made that he should have had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame years ago. Wayne signed to Cash Money as a child, came up through the Hot Boys, and then spent the next two decades bending rap around himself with the Tha Carter series and a mixtape run that other artists still study. He also built Young Money, which is how Drake and Nicki Minaj got their first real platform. Add the Grammys and the sheer volume of the catalog and the case makes itself.
Grandmaster Flash gets his star under his given name, Joseph Saddler, and his selection connects the class back to the origin point of the whole thing. Flash is the DJ who turned turntables into an instrument, and The Message, recorded with the Furious Five, remains the record that proved hip hop could carry social weight and still move a party. He is already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted with the Furious Five as the first hip hop act to get in, and now he adds a Hollywood Walk of Fame star to that.
Charlamagne tha God is the lone Radio honoree in the entire class, which says something about where he sits in the media landscape. The Breakfast Club made morning radio appointment listening again, and Charlamagne turned the co-host chair into a platform that reaches into publishing, television and politics. He is already in the Radio Hall of Fame for the show. Being the only radio name on a 32 person list puts him in rare company.
On the film side, Idris Elba and Delroy Lindo represent two different kinds of longevity. Elba built a global career out of Stringer Bell on The Wire and then refused to be typecast by any of it, moving between Luther, Beasts of No Nation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, blockbusters and a DJ career he never abandoned. Lindo has been one of the most quietly essential actors in American film for more than three decades, from Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Crooklyn and Clockers to Get Shorty, then a late career stretch with Da 5 Bloods and The Harder They Fall that finally got him the awards conversation he had earned long before.
David Alan Grier and Raven-Symoné round out the Television category, and both of them have résumés that look like a history of comedy on screen. Grier was one of the founding pillars of In Living Color, the show that reset sketch comedy in the nineties, and he has spent the years since moving between television and Broadway, where he has been nominated multiple times and finally won a Tony for The Piano Lesson. Raven-Symoné started on The Cosby Show as a toddler, went to Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, then carried That’s So Raven and the Cheetah Girls franchise on her back and made herself one of the defining faces of an entire Disney generation.
The honorees were chosen from hundreds of nominations by the Walk of Fame Selection Committee and ratified by the Hollywood Chamber Board of Directors on July 22. Walk of Fame Selection Chairman Peter Roth said the 32 individuals have each made a lasting impact on audiences through their talent, creativity and dedication to their craft. Frierson framed the class as a reflection of the breadth and imagination of the entertainment community.
Nobody is walking down Hollywood Boulevard to see their name in terrazzo tomorrow. Recipients have up to two years from selection to schedule a ceremony, which means the unveilings will roll out across 2027 and into 2028, with dates typically announced about ten days ahead of time by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Eight stars, four categories, and a stretch of the culture that runs from a Bronx DJ inventing a genre to a New Orleans rapper who rewired it to a girl from Illinois who has been on our screens since she was eleven.
