Hey, Oscar: We saw your boob last night. His name is Seth MacFarlane.
MacFarlane’s tone-deaf, unfunny, sexist, puerile, straight-from-the-ninth-grade-locker-room “We Saw Your Boobs” routine about nekkid actresses was lower than a cockroach’s pedicure. Charlize Theron’s pained reaction shot (which was part of the act, but fitting anyway) spoke for the world: Several of the actresses MacFarlane mocked were shown in rape scenes.
Jennifer Lawrence, you weren’t the first to fall on your face last night. And the burst bathroom pipe backstage wasn’t the only thing stinking up the place.
WireImage
SOUR NOTE:
Oscar host Seth MacFarlane is joined by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe for a musical number.
MacFarlane, who was hired by first-time Oscar producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadon to bring back some life to the wax museum, instead led a night of gaffes, awkwardness and slights that concluded just as inappropriately as it began, with a surprise appearance by Michelle Obama as the Best Picture presenter.
Michelle Obama is not a neutral ceremonial personage, like the queen of England. She is a partisan political figure. Hollywood liberals, this isn’t hard: Picture how you’d have felt if the climactic moment in 1985 were handed over for the purpose of glamorizing Nancy Reagan, with a phalanx of uniformed troops grinning nervously behind her. “Creepy South American totalitarian lite vibe,” tweeted Walter Kirn, and he writes for the liberal journal The New Republic. Even President Ronald Reagan never busted in live on the Oscars, and Reagan was an actual movie star, academy member and former president of the Screen Actors Guild. (He taped a non-self-aggrandizing “enjoy the show” welcome for the March 30, 1981, Oscars — which had to be delayed because he was shot that very day.)
Off-putting moments were scattered throughout. Instead of doing a good-natured Billy Crystal-style musical salute to the nominees, MacFarlane seemed determined to show off his pipes. (Impressive, but so what? The Oscars aren’t a Seth MacFarlane concert.) It was his jokes that were off-key.
MacFarlane made a funny about Chris Brown beating Rihanna, another about Latinos with accents, and another about orgies at Jack Nicholson’s house, the place where Roman Polanski gave a little girl drugs for the purpose of raping and sodomizing her.
“Too soon?” he said, after joking that no actor ever got into Lincoln’s head like John Wilkes Booth. MacFarlane once made a joke on “Family Guy” about JFK and RFK Pez dispensers getting their heads blown off, but, no, it’s not too soon for Lincoln jokes. They just have to be funny. You know what shouldn’t be funny? The theme music the orchestra plays to nudge aside the winners. Playing “Jaws” humiliated the poor relations from the tech side.
Take away MacFarlane’s pointless, look-at-me-I-can-dance routine (again: We didn’t tune in to see Family Guy cut a rug with Harry Potter and Robin) and you’ve got a few extra seconds for each acceptance speech.
MacFarlane is a voiceover actor and writer, not a comic, and the Oscars are not the place to launch a career in live performing. Cutaways are fine on “Family Guy,” but at the Oscars, you have to build energy in the room (as he did in his best moment, the “Sound of Music” gag), not rely on taped bits.
Perhaps to cover up the sound of crickets, MacFarlane kept laughing at his own gags. This was in keeping with the self-loving motif of the evening: Producers Meron and Zadan turned the evening into an infomercial for “Chicago,” as if no one would remember they were executive producers on that film, while Best Original Screenplay winner Quentin Tarantino thanked not his handlers but himself for his own brilliance.
And those bits had arthritis. William Shatner as Capt. Kirk? Really? Sally Field probably thought she’d heard the last “Flying Nun” joke 20 years ago, and viewers under 35 must have been baffled.
Even the evening’s best moments were partially bungled. How did the memorial reel manage to leave out Andy Griffith, Richard Dawson and Larry Hagman? The Denzel Washington Best Actor clip gave away the climactic twist of “Flight.” The James Bond segment was supposed to be introduced not by Halle Berry but by all the 007 stars together — but Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan hate Bond producers and refused. Still, if you have both Shirley Bassey and Adele in the house, how can you not have them do a duet?
“Couldn’t they just have hired Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host the show?” asked William Shatner in a segment in which MacFarlane tried to head off bad reviews by predicting them. Seth, what Booth did to Lincoln you did to yourself.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com
Dismal show a gaffe-fest
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