Anyone with even half a sense of humor had to be sympathizing with Seth MacFarlane about an hour into Sunday night's Academy Awards "ceremony", when this year's host clearly looked as if he'd just as soon go to a small bar somewhere and strike up an impromptu rendition of "Come Fly With Me."

Has there ever been an Oscar® broadcast where at least half the jokes didn't fall flat? Where a third of them weren't cruel to someone? Seriously, why the hate? Sure, the "We Saw Your Boobs" song was tasteless, but this is an industry in which one can't be taken seriously as an actress without doing a nude scene somewhere along the line (and Kate Winslet HAS done a lot of them, that's just a fact), while outside of Harvey Keitel and Ewan MacGregor and Jason Segel, how many actors have actually gone Full Monty? And wasn't that the point of the song? The truth hurts, doesn't it, folks? (Also, too.)

It may be that Borscht Belters like Billy Crystal are better able to softly land the offensive joke than the creator of the song "Prom Night Dumpster Baby". It could also be that in an industry full of self-important, self-styled artistes who even in quality fare are still creating popular entertainment, a guy who's made $100 million on fart jokes and cruelty to a sixteen-year-old female cartoon character and who waltzes into the industry and makes a funny movie about an id-dominated talking teddybear that grosses a half a billion dollars worldwide, is a bit too much of a reminder that not even the great Ang Lee is Rembrandt.

Using disclaimers is a time-tested method of cutting off criticism of the past. The comedians Louie Anderson and John Pinette tell fat jokes so no one can say they're fat. MacFarlane used his advance press last night to at least try to cut off the Worst. Oscar. Host. Ever. meme before a Hollywood community and its hangers-on could say it as if it were something new. The opening bit didn't fall as flat as many people seemed to think it did, but it was clear that Seth was playing to an extremely tough room. Yes, he didn't help his case, but there were seven writers credited for this broadcast, and only one of them was named "Seth MacFarlane."

Where the show's producers and writers went wrong was not in letting Seth be Seth, because aside from the aforementioned "We Saw Your Boobs", which has generated the expected pearl clutching from the usual suspects about misogyny and sexism and the glorification of rape culture (no, people, pointing out that even the most serious actresses seem to sooner or later earn cred by showing breasts is not "rape culture"; forcing women to have invasive vaginal ultrasounds after taking RU-486 and coming up with sodomized virgin exceptions are rape culture -- and calling satire the same thing just makes it impossible to address REAL rape culture) and the poor-taste John Wilkes Booth joke, there isn't a single joke that McFarlane uttered that wouldn't have been given a free pass if it had come out of the mouth of Billy Crystal.

No, where the producers went wrong was in building a show around movie musicals, and then not letting the host, who has a magnificent voice and a real feel for the American songbook, sing a medley of songs like "Ya Got Trouble" from The Music Man (and wouldn't he be an awesome Harold Hill?), and "Singin' in the Rain" and "On the Street Where You Live" from My Fair Lady and for Goddess' sake, why didn't they let HIM sing "Razzle Dazzle" from Chicago instead of having Catherine Zeta-Jones' lackluster rendition of "All That Jazz"? Because the man knows his way around schmaltz music, and if they'd just let him use his magnificent singing voice, the press would have sung a very different tune (sorry) the next day.

What Seth MacFarlane did on this broadcast was hold a mirror up to Hollywood, and Hollywood didn't like what it saw. It didn't like seeing a sexist industry in which screenwriters and directors and prodcers whose sexuality hasn't progressed beyond "Look! Titties!" require women to get naked, but not men. It didn't like being reminded at what actresses have to go through to keep their figures and their youth, and of how much it takes to be a Melissa McCarthy or an Adele Adkins and put on an evening gown and dare to be fierce in it. It didn't like being reminded of the trophy dates of George Clooney and of the absurdity of "It's an honor just to be nominated" and of ageism and of how there still seem to be only three roles that are ever written for black men -- the badass, the noble slave, and the "Magic Negro". Seth MacFarlane drew a big fat magic-marker underscore under the reality that the Academy Awards broadcast is a giant, bloated exercise in self-indulgence, in which wealthy plastic people congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe (heh) because they go in front of a camera and play in honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars. There isn't a host in the world that can "be a good host" because the broadcast itself has become hopeless. Gone are the Sacheen Littlefeathers. Gone are the Michael Moores, daring to make a ferocious political statement on the stage. Gone are Cher in her crazy costumes and Bjork in her swan dress. Now we get a bunch of men in lookalike tuxes, and women who seem all to have rented their dresses from the same prom store. Maybe we can blame Joan Rivers for the irrelevance of everything except evening gowns, but no matter whose fault it is, this broadcast has become as unnecessary and irrelevant as the Miss America pageant.

So what I propose is to stop looking for the perfect host and put the damn thing out of its misery. No one gives a crap about who wins anymore, because it's all been decided already after the Golden Globes (which are a lot more fun to watch), the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild Awards, and the Independent Spirit Awards. The Oscar® broadcast is the second biggest anticlimactic event of the television year not called "The Pro Bowl". Oh, we still want to dish about the clothes. So let's just close up this Big Oscar Show, turn it back into a closed reception, and then set up the red carpet outside the Vanity Fair party. Because after all, the only thing anyone really cares about is seeing whatever glorious creation Salma Hayek is going to be wearing anyway.

Labels: Academy Awards, Family Guy, humor, hypocrisy, self-important blowhards, Seth MacFarlane, sexism, Shooting Self in Foot

This time of year always makes me nostalgic for those good old days when I spent half of every Saturday and often a good chunk of Sunday sitting in a darkened movie theatre with a small notepad, scribbling notes to refer to when writing a review later. I never had the sense back then that time was getting away from me, that I'd blink and the weekend was over. Of course I was younger then, and was working low-stress jobs where I either had nothing at all to do and could spend the day writing, or where I had enough to do to fill up a normal eight-hour day with only a 20-minute drive each way. Long about 2005, I decided I'd had enough and hung up my movie review had largely for good. Once a year, at Christmas time, I try to meet up with my old friend Gabriel for a "Critics over Coffee", just for old times sake and because I miss his company, for he is always modern and fabulous, just as his old blog says. But this year, despite the fact of the entire week off between Christmas and New Year's, Other Things of which you all are well aware got in the way. (I'm still waiting to hit a wall about that one, because I know that sometime, probably long about March, I'm going to find myself curled up in a fetal position in the corner as the end of fifty-seven years of Very Complex and Troubled Relationship really hits me with a two-by-four. She would want it that way.)

But tomorrow night is the first night of the Silly Season for movie fans and those for whom entertainment consists of snarking at people who have more money, often for less reason, than we or anyone we know will ever have. It's the NLCS of movie awards, or the NFC Championship series, or the Grand Prix of Figure Skating final in an Olympics year.

In the years since that group of starfuckers known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association learned their lesson from the Infamous Pia Zadora Fracas of 1981, the annual Golden Globe Awards show has become the Academy Awards' hipper younger sibling. I actually prefer watching the Globes, not only because the very name of the award -- "Golden Globes" -- evokes what pops out of the bodices of the lookalike trophy wives, girlfriends, and miscellaneous escorts of the women in attendance, but because the Globes just don't take themselves seriously as much other than an excuse for a bunch of Hollywood names to dress up, get plastered on national television, and perhaps make some connections with people more famous and popular than they are. You never know what could happen at the Globes, unlike the Oscars®, where it's inevitable that some actress who was a shoo-in from the very beginning will get on stage as if her award was a complete surprise that came out of the blue, cry uncontrollably (*cough* Halle Berry *cough*), and thank her agent before she even thanks her own spouse (*cough* Hilary Swank *cough*). You do get this at the Globes too (*cough* Kate Winslet *cough*), but at least then someone else will get up on stage and make fun of her, everyone will laugh, and no one will think that the little statue is somehow the Nobel Prize.

I also prefer the Globes because they are now way ahead of the curve in that they have always recognized television as well as movies. Given that shows like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and others have not just shown that great work can be done on the smaller screen, but have also started to attract actors who at one time would never even have considered doing television. For my money, the really good stuff is happening in my living room, not at the local Clearview Cinema.

Then there's the thankless job of hosting. Ricky Gervais, a comic whose charms have always escaped me, had an interesting run, but this year the Globes are being hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, which promises some interesting times and jokes that go over the head of most of the audience.

But the real jewel in the crown of Hollywood self-congratulation is still the Oscars, as it allows the film industry to think of itself as something other than the creators of Honest Stories of Working People As Told By Rich Hollywood Stars. The Oscar® broadcast has never seemed stodgier than last year, when a clearly "I'm So Done With This" Billy Chrystal labored through the two-hour show like an aged Borscht Belt comic with a heart condition, wondering why no one laughs at his jokes anymore. After the horrible James Franco/Anne Hathaway disaster of 2011, anything would have been an improvement. But this year the Academy did something amazing, surprising everyone with their jaw-dropping pick of Seth MacFarlane, the multi-talented creator of Family Guy and American Dad, music lyricist, Nelson Riddle-wannabe, crooner of obscure American standards and overall Rat Pack-channeler, to host the awards.

It's impossible to be on the fence about MacFarlane. Either you love him or you hate him. Either you think he's a ferociously talented, handsome if smarmy and lounge lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who also has a wicked sense of humor that he doesn't always know how to control and a glorious singing voice that could open anyone's ears to the charm of American schmaltz music, or you think he's just a smarmy, lounge-lizardish throwback to a sexist, misogynistic time who has a sick sense of humor that isn't even funny and thinks he'a Frank Sinatra when at best he's Frank Sinatra, Jr. And that he's a hack to boot who doesn't write every word of his shows himself the way Trey Parker does. Here at Casa la Brilliant, we loves us some Seth MacFarlane, so if you fall into the latter category, you can stop reading now.

MacFarlane is a man both very much in his time and oddly out of it. The preposterous success of Family Guy, with its boorish alcoholic patriarch, savvy if ineffectual mother, hopelessly unpopular daughter, vaguely intellectually disabled son, at times variously homicidal and sexually confused infant, and a dog that is the only intelligent one in the family, often goes too far. It has a tendency to become not just unfunny but cruel, seeming to endorse what I think it intends to ridicule. The show relies too much on gimmicks like ending the show with a Conway Twitty clip only because the writers had no idea how to end it, and shock humor that often seems like Howard Stern circa 1987. But when the show hits its mark, it's hilarious, and there's always just enough sweetness to the hapless Griffins to redeem whatever shocking, outrageous things they do. They're the Simpsons in gargoyle form, and they get away with things that often leave me saying, "Did they just really do that?" Because MacFarlane and his writers are always pushing the Fox censors to see at what point they'll have to stop. These days there doesn't seem to be one, unlike a few years ago, when the censors prompted this number, which didn't even appear in television until recently:



It's also in numbers like this where that you see where MacFarlane's heart really lies -- in the music. The best part of Family Guy is the musical numbers, which MacFarlane writes along with composers Walter Murphy and Ron Jones. MacFarlane has a feel for the Big Showstopper Number and it is no doubt this talent, along with his now-immortal comeback from what in anyone else would be a jaw-dropping mistake at the Emmys, and what is perceived at least to be his appeal among "the kids" that made the Powers that Be tap him to host the Academy Awards. Because let's face it, after the Big Opening Number, what does the host really have to do?

On Thursday, MacFarlane, along with rapidly physically disappearing actress Emma Stone, announced the Academy Award nominees, which predictably resulted in a whole lot of pearl-clutching from those who think that an announcement that Silver Linings Playbook is nominated for Best Picture is akin to finding Shakespeare's Long Lost Plays. Yes, MacFarlane made the obligatory Controversial Hitler Joke^TM, but it sounded more like it was scripted by Bruce Vilanch (who writes most of the Academy Awards show gags) than by MacFarlane, whose outrageousness runs more towards jokes about S&M, menstruation, public drunkenness, flatulence, and other sophomoric topics. Someone needs to tell these people that it's mostly Jews who joke about Hitler (see also: Mel Brooks) anyway.

Anyone who thinks that the Academy Awards are about the Gravitas of the Great Art of Film is delusional anyway (A Beautiful Mind? Shakespeare In Love? Really? Rocky winning instead of Taxi Driver, Network, AND All the President's Men? Forrest Gump over The Shawshank Redemption? Crash rather than Brokeback Mountain? Seriously? Seriously?). I'm sure that MacFarlane is more than game to pop those balloons when they show up on Oscar® night. I think the outrage about MacFarlane is more a function of resentment at the increasing incursion of what the stodgier folks at the pretentiously-named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think of as the inferior medium of television. Ted may have grossed a half a billion dollars worldwide, but as far as these folks are concerned, it's a gross-out movie about a talking teddybear done by a TV hack.

Consider this, though: Ordinarily Mr. Brilliant would watch Downton Abbey before he'd deign to watch the Oscars®, and he would rather have hot metal spikes shoved through his eyeballs than watch Downton Abeey. This year he can't wait for the Night of the Chick Superbowl. And THAT, my friends, may be the REAL reason why the Academy picked the voice of Peter, Brian, Stewie, and Quagmire.

And since I have no idea how to end this post, I'll just take a page from MacFarlane's book, but instead of Conway Twitty, here's Seth MacFarlane singing "Ain't That a Kick in the Head." and "Come Fly With Me".

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, music, Seth McFarlane

It's always amusing to watch older people (and yes, I am one) try to figure out what "the kids" would like to see, because it's always so tragically, desperately wrong. I'll give the folks who put together the Academy Awards credit for trying to shake things up a bit, but if you're going to bring in the kids, a self-important, pretentious quasi-intellectual indie guy and a Liza Minelli-lookalike who did a couple of princess movies and seems to also be a big presence on the indie circuit is hardly the way to go.

Last night's broadcast, described today by Randi Rhodes as "the worst television viewing of our lifetime" started out promisingly, with James Franco and Anne Hathaway in an Inception dream sequence. But it went rapidly downhill from there, and as soon as it devolved into Hathaway bickering with her mom on worldwide television and Franco making sure everyone know he's still young enough to have a grandma, I knew that I was going to watch the American Masters documentary on Ahmet Ertegun that was being broadcast on Channel 31 instead. Because the only thing I really wanted to see from last night's broadcast was this:

Because I doubt there breathes a woman in this country over the age of thirty-five who hasn't been madly in love with Colin Firth ever since this:

So I wanted to hear what The Man Who Will Always Be Darcy had to say, and as one could have predicted if one had watched any of his interviews this season, he knocked it out of the park.

I dare say that Colin Firth could do a quite lovely job hosting the Academy Awards, with a light froth of self-deprecating charm mingled with the self-important ponderousness that this annual festival of industry self-congratulation requires. And after watching Joel McHale's obsessive tubthumping the night before at the normally very funny Spirit Awards about what he referred to as "having lunch down at the Y" and missing John Waters, who used to host the Spirit Awards, terribly, the show could do worse. But what a step down that would be for the Divine Mr. Firth, who having finally received the brass ring he's deserved for so long, should finally become a household name outside of those households occupied by sighing middle-aged women.

But that's not who I'm thinking should host this show. I'm not thinking in terms of George Clooney either, for while I like him as an actor, and respect his good works, his dimply adorableness would probably wear thin after three hours.

It seems to me that what the show needs is someone who can pull off the infusion of snark that this annual spectacle of self-importance so desperately needs, while doing it so quickly and so deftly that the bejeweled and botoxed divas and identically-tuxed men won't even know what hit them. It needs a man whose television work every week never fails to make me say, wonderingly, "HOW THE HELL DOES HE GET AWAY WITH THAT IN PRIME TIME???"

I speak, of course, of this man:


Listen to Seth MacFarlane's rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" and think of what he could do with the kind of cheesy musical number that usually opens the show:


He's already hosted the Writer's Guild Awards:

And while he doesn't wear a suite QUITE as nicely as Colin Firth, he wears it quite well.

So, if you're with me in believing that only Seth MacFarlane can save the Motion Picture Academy from dishing up three hours of this kind of crap next year, go tell them so.

Labels: Academy Awards, Seth McFarlane

Ebert is livetweeting the Academy Awards. And I finally understand the awesomeness that is Mo'nique.

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, Roger Ebert

I just wish that Kate Winslet, with an extraordinary body of work behind her already at the age of 33, didn't have to, as she quipped in that infamous episode of Extras, make a movie about the Holocaust -- a clip that will now live in infamy. It's true that to some degree, Winslet has played a variation of the same character in every film in which she's starred. She's always the free spirit battling the Forces of Authority and Expectation. But aren't most good roles for women some variation of this character? And if you have a choice between playing Woman Triumphant or, say, Sophie in Sophie's Choice or Leticia Musgrove in Monster's Ball, who are YOU going to want to play? The fact of the matter is that women who buck societal expectations are far more interesting as cinematic fodder.

When Winslet's body of work is discussed, it's always in the context of That Boat Movie and the films she's done since. But to get a sense of just how talented this woman is, you have to look back at the work she did before anyone knew who she was.

Here's Winslet at the age of seventeen in Heavenly Creatures, directed by a guy named Peter Jackson:


In Sense and Sensibility at eighteen:


And in Jude at nineteen:


And all this BEFORE the boat movie.

Say what you will, the woman has talent. She has talent, she's built her career the way SHE wanted it, not the way others might have; dieting down to a size zero and exercising her way into a column of sinew and gristle. She swears, she smokes, and doesn't mince words. And women everywhere adore her. But in the industry and the press, there's been this undercurrent of Katehate for the last decade, with endless articles about her weight, her personal life, and this year, her unabashed longing for the golden statue. Does the entertainment press really believe that any of these people believe that "it's an honor just to be nominated"? Do they really expect us to believe that disappointed losers don't spend a little time in the ladies' room fixing their mascara after a few unbidden tears crept out?

Perhaps it's that women aren't supposed to openly want anything. The obsession with Winslet's weight (and is there anyone left on earth who still thinks she's fat?), the fact that her characters are all women who WANT -- they want love, they want sex, they want to LIVE -- all contribute to the impression that this is a woman with APPETITES. And perhaps that's terrifying to an industry in which anything over a size zero is considered to be an elephant. And she WANTED to win an Academy Award, which seems to be some kind of heinous covetousness instead of refreshingly honest.

This is a woman who, like the characters she plays, lives her life on her own terms. Perhaps the entertainment press found her unseemingly covetous in recent weeks. But for those of us who admire the gift of being able to draw us into the inner life of a character on screen, last night was a recognition that is long overdue.

(UPDATE: God knows there's plenty about which I disagree with Melissa on a regular basis. But about this post? Word. But I think I like this photo better.)

Labels: Academy Awards, Kate Winslet, movies, weight

I really don't have much to say, but ModFab does. So go read his recap of last night's Academy Awards. Besides, he does it better than I do anyway.

Labels: Academy Awards