Kazzy and Russell take on Tinseltown

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1. Regarding Shirley Bassey, she did seem a little off at first- maybe it was nerves, maybe it was insufficient warm up, maybe she couldn’t quite hear herself or the music properly. However, she pretty quickly righted it and gave a great performance.

   I’ll say that MacFarlane did well, and far better than I expected… of course, I assume hosts are going to suck.

2. This was so awesome.

   • It really was a blast… one of the funnest things I’ve done in a while. As I say at the end there, I really do encourage folks to try similar projects.

3. MacFarlane did surprisingly well. I think Letterman earns the spot of worst host since I’ve been watching (was flying during Franco’s, so missed it).

   Very happy for Adele and Jennifer Lawrence. “Skyfall” was the best Bond themesong since the Shirley Bassey days – maybe the best thing about the movie. A little surprised about Waltz. He did a fine job, but his performance/character in Django wasn’t much different than his performance in Basterds. I was rooting for DeNiro.

   Overall, pleased with the show -and I actually liked the Shatner bit – it ran a little long, but hey, it’s the Oscars and at least it wasn’t boring

   • I didn’t see the Letterman, so I can’t comment, but didn’t Whoopi Goldberg host it? I seem to recall her doing an appalling job. Also, the resurrection of Billy Crystal didn’t work out so well.

     • She hosted a few times. As with the other multiple-time hosts I’ve seen, she had a good year or two then she went downhill.

       Letterman was the wrong personality for the room. His penchant for the absurd didn’t fit with an evening that takes itself so seriously.

       But nothing, absolutely NOTHING has compared with the unmitigated shitshow that was the Franco debacle.

       • The only regret I have is that we didn’t do this DURING the Franco debacle. Reading as your emails slowly descend into a drunken, frothing madness would have been far better than watching JLaw fall up the stairs.

         • They would have been increasingly unhinged variations on the themes “What the fish is wrong with you!??!?” (except in private communiques I would probably abandon the League euphemism) and “Are they seriously paying you for this? Are you this much of an asshole in everything you do??!??!”

         • Are you this much of an asshole in everything you do??!??!”

           How else do you get to be dictator?

   • Letterman hosted one of the few Oscar ceremonies that I saw start to finish.

     I laughed out loud a lot during his show. “Wanna see my Jack Nicholson impersonation?” “Would you like to buy a monkey?” “Uma. Oprah. Oprah. Uma.”

     • I do remember the “Would you like to buy a monkey?” bit fondly.

       • Which is of course from that work of cinematic genius and Letterman’s only (?) film role, Cabin Boy:

         http://youtu.be/3X8istCTeQE

4. Here is the running diary I kept, posted over at MD: https://ordinary-times.com/jaybird/2013/02/25/oscars-running-diary/

   Russ, if you want to throw a link to this in the OP, I don’t object.

   • Your wish, good sir, etc etc etc.

     And I had a blast doing this. Thank you so much for suggesting it. I am… dare I say it, looking forward to watching… a basketball game now?

5. Thanks guys! This was a fun read, much better than watching the actual show. If you ever do team up to watch a basketball game, I’ll definitely be reading.

   • Thanks, Michelle! And the basketball game (or other Major Sporting Event of Kazzy’s Choosing) is totally on as far as I’m concerned.

6. It’s hilarious to see all the frothing about Michelle Obama’s appearance from people either too dumb to Google or dishonest to acknowledge that Laura Bush did te same in 2002. (At some point that distinction just ceases to matter.)

   • Hey, that was the year Michael Moore did his thing!

     Heh. Awk-ward.

   • Was that recorded live? At first I thought it was pre-recorded, but her last interaction with Jack didn’t seem to be, and a pre-recording risks the news being leaked out.

     • The whole thing was live, as far as I could tell. It was impressively smooth.

   • Mrs. Bush didn’t further glorify the imperial military industrial complex in her appearance.

     • They were bombing Baghdad at the time, though. It balances out.

7. So the problem with the little awards is that we’re awkwardly splitting the difference. I think if they spent more time focusing on the minor awards we’d be more entertained.

   I feel like we saw 2-second clips of each movie. Show us 30 seconds, and that’s enough to identify with the movies–enough to care who wins even if we didn’t know the award existed before today.

   It’s also a better way to reach out to the blockbuster movie audience. I remember being bored with the big awards as a kid, because they went to boring dramas I never saw. The effects awards are where big-budget action movies shine. And actually featuring those movies in the awards show is a far better way of appealing to your big-budget audience than by having the cast of the avengers do half-assed bits as they present awards.

   • Hey! That’s a great idea, and one I don’t think I’ve seen floated elsewhere.

8. So I think Meron and Zadan were bad choices to produce. The whole “tribute to music” theme was a disaster. We got songs from Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Goldfinger but managed to skip performances of two actual “best song” nominees? really?

   • Not only that, but did anyone else think it was weird that they highlighted songs in movies… by choosing a large number of songs that had been written for the stage?

     • Any year that has movies that were adapted from Broadway musicals is likely to feature music that is far more catchy than years without.

       Only the best (for small values of “best”) musicals will make it past pre-production talks and so, already, you’re dealing with the cream of the crop. A song has to be Shirley Bassey levels of awesome to compete with that.

   • I actually sort of enjoyed the theme, at least in concept. Going into and out of most commercial breaks, they usually played an instrumental version of a famous movie song. Zazzy and I delighted in figuring them all out. Some were immediately identifiable, some were, “Oh, Oh, I know that… what is it!”, while others were complete mysteries.

     Overall execution was lacking but I don’t think the idea was a total bust.

     • Oh, they always do that.

9. I’m guessing that was unintentional, because Russell’s not a fan and Kazzy’s too young.

10. I am only amazed at how Seth McFarlane has managed to shield himself from all critique and criticism.

    A lot of my liberal blogs found is routine to be predictable and boring. I tend to concur. This has awoken the sleeping Dragon of the Internet and cries of “lighten up.” Plenty of encouragement and agreement as well.

    I dislike that McFarlane was brought in to attract guys. I dislike that guy=lowest common denominator in American parlance. And that his fans do not seem to understand the purpose of critique and are outraged the people might find him unfunny.

    • You’ve nicked on something that I’ve been thinking about. “Ironic Racism” has been bubbling up in more and more places and, ironically, in places where “no, it’s ironic!” is seen as a legitimate defense (see, for example, the creative team for the hit television show Girls).

      Mockery of stuff that much of society says “you shouldn’t make fun of *THIS*. *THIS* is too important to make fun of!” strikes me as a target-rich environment. Stuff Carlin made fun of in the 70’s is now part of our cultural subconscious (though we still can’t say five or six of the seven words on television). Now, if comedians wish to go sacred cow tipping, they’re going to have to find some sacred cows first.

      To everyone’s surprise, they seem to be finding them.

      • Holocaust’s still a fine sacred cow. So’s rape, and half a dozen other things.

        The bar goes up, but comedians are good at limbo anyhow…
        (*humms limbo of the lost*)

        • How about holocaust rape?

      • Er, seen *BY SOME* as a legitimate defense.

      • I think it is questionable whether “ironic racism” is a valid defense of Girls.

        There were a lot of comments at the time that said “ironic racism is still racism” and I concur.

        Yes comedy and comedians will always go after sacred cows but that does not mean they will succeed or even be remotely amusing.

        Seth McFarlane makes jokes at the expense of groups he is not a part of. There is a difference between Larry David, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen telling Jewish jokes and McFarlane doing the same. Larry David had a sketch on Curb Your Enthusiasm where he found out his agent wasn’t Jewish despite said agent’s last name. That was funny. McFarlane’s Jews control Hollywood is just an old anti-Semitic troupe.

        McFarlane is a heterosexual white guy. His “lighten up” brigade of defenders are also largely heterosexual white guys. In other words, they are defending their right to be make fun of minorities and not examine the pain that undlies their jokes.

        • Yes comedy and comedians will always go after sacred cows but that does not mean they will succeed or even be remotely amusing.

          Dude, please understand that even as I agree with you, I’m weighing whether these words might have been said in complete earnestness about Lenny Bruce (whom, mind, I freakin’ adore).

          • They probably were but I would say Lenny Bruce had a level of talent that Seth McFarlane never reached. Didn’t he always have a much more of a counter-culture audience?

          • Yes, but the counter-culture became the culture. Give it a few decades to percolate.

            In an ocean of counter-culture, what would counter-counter-culture look like?

            Girls? Family Guy?

          • I should add that a big problem with the left is that we always talk about these things in unrepentent grad-school language. The kind of language that often just causes an eyeroll because it looks like a bunch of SAT words strung together.

          • Lenny Bruch appeared in nightclubs, playing to an audience of young adults who considered themselves smart and hip.

            Seth McFarlane’s stuff is on TV and aimed at 12-year-olds.

          • Mike brings up a good point on the differences in audiences.

          • Along this line (not in response to any particular comment in this subthread) I wonder what everyone thinks of the Onion kerfuffle?

          • Kolohe,

            I actually understood exactly the type of humor they were going for, but thought their choice of language and target was wrong. Rose and I have spoken about how some people wrongly occupy “untouchable” status, which ultimately denies the fullness of their humanity. For instance (and this is completely hypothetical), if Q really was a spoiled little brat but everyone pretended she wasn’t because she’s just so cute… I’d have an issue with that. So I understood that they were attempting to draw attention to our tendency to fawn over people we really know nothing about, a point worth making. I just think they picked a really terrible way to go about it.

            I thought their apology was one of the better ones I’ve seen. A true apology, not the usual non-apology-apologies we see.

          • I basically agree with Kazzy. I can understand what they were going for with the humor, but it was executed in an utterly terrible way. Y0u don’t call a nine-year-old girl an unspeakably nasty word (one of the very few I literally pretty much never speak) and then hide behind the tissue of a defense that it’s just a joke. She’s too young to be expected to understand that kind of irony, and simply hoping she won’t come across it is a lousy contingency plan.

            I think it’s telling that The Onion, which published a picture of several deities/religious figures engaged in graphic sex without apology, would back off immediately and issue what seems like a very sincere mea culpa.

          • I think it’s a perfect example of one kind of sick joke — something that’s funny because it’s so awful that even the worst person in the world would never say it seriously. But, yeah, it’s completely unacceptable to aim it at a real person. Try substituting Madeleine or Olive Hoover.

            And, as Kazzy mentioned, that is a first-rate apology.

          • I did not watch the awards, nor do I care for Seth McFarlane (or at least, I loathe “Family Guy” with a white-hot fury that has prevented me from giving any of his other projects much attention).

            But I am a big Onion fan; and The Onion has been known, from time to time, to go where others fear to tread, which is (IMO) part of their greatness.

            I see what The Onion were going for – a slam on vapid TMZ-Bravo-type shallow gossipy cattiness; but as a matter of courtesy and taste I would have avoided using a real child for the joke. They went over the line; to their credit, I think they realized that & apologized pretty quickly.

            The joke required a child (or at least someone uncontroversially “innocent”/likable) for it to work; but still. Maybe they could have invented a fictional child star, though a tweet is too short for the setup (=fake background/bio/movie).

            RE: McFarlane, I have already made my bias against him clear, and did not see the show. But ND was referring above to “Jews/Hollywood” jokes. I can see such a joke theoretically riffing on:

            Jews
            Hollywood
            Jews in Hollywood
            Hollywood’s attitude towards Jews
            The perception that Jews run Hollywood
            The degree to which there is any basis in reality for that perception, and the historical reasons for that reality
            The kind of person (Mel) for whom “The Jews Run Hollywood” is a self-evident and nefarious conspiracy that keeps him up at night
            Etc., etc.

            This list is hardly exhaustive, and more than one riff can be incorporated into the joke(s). So my questions are these:

            To what extent is offense sometimes taken as a result of miscommunication/garbled signal regarding the true “target” (either the sender did not encode his joke artfully, and/or the receiver is not hearing what the sender intended)?

            Is it always the sender’s responsibility to tell a joke in such a way that there is never any ambiguity as to his target? Do the receivers bear some responsibility to give the sender the benefit of the doubt when the signal is ambiguous?

            Most crucially to me, to what extent is it a mistake for receivers to always assume that a given joke has any intended “target” at all? This is something about which Kazzy and I went back and forth on the Pistorius thread a bit, and it seems to me ND is also looking at these jokes through this lens, when he talks about jokes “at the expense of groups” (implying, to me, that there must *always* a be cost imputed to some party for each joke told; someone must always be the “butt” or object; someone is always “taking a loss”).

            I remain uncertain that it is wise to see a “target” or “expense” in every joke; some jokes are just stupid/bad jokes; they are not always weapons nor satire. Sometimes they are just dadaistic absurdities, no more meaningful than glossolalia; words and ideas recombined in surprising or novel configurations (or, in the case of McFarlane’s Family Guy, unsurprising – FG often tries to incite laughter through simple receiver recognition of the trope being referenced – this is supremely lazy & it offends me creatively).

            Unless the jokes are intended to incite violence, or to deceive, then they (IMO) are probably best considered as just words, not sticks and stones; the jokes and their tellers usually best ignored if their content is not pleasing (for it is the shocked/negative reaction that the sacred-cow-tippers and nose-tweakers crave above all).

            This is not to excuse jokes when they ARE being wielded as weapons to injure, nor to say that they *still* can’t be tasteless or insulting; merely to say that I sometimes think we are often too quick to view them through that lens, and look for “targets” on whose behalf we can take (or imagine) offense. And sometimes that’s as much about defining *ourselves* as [not like the joke-teller] as it is anything the joke-teller has actually said.

          • National Review does not disappoint. It considers apologizing for calling a 9-year-old girl a **** to be “PC”.

          • Lenny Bruch appeared in nightclubs, playing to an audience of young adults who considered themselves smart and hip.

            That was in the mid-60’s. By the mid-70’s, George Carlin was on the Midnight Special. The counter-culture was well on its way to becoming the culture.

            I’m still wondering what the counter-counter-culture would end up looking like (or even whether we’re in the counter-counter-counter-culture by now).

          • Carlin was tame compared to Bruce and much smarter about what he could get away with, which is why he died old and beloved. Carlin was also a much more skilled comedian, of course; if he wanted to, he could avoid sex, politics, religion, and drugs, and still been hilarious. Try picturing Lenny Bruce narrating Thomas the Tank Engine stories.

          • Glyph,

            I am big on the ingroup/outgroup dichtomy rule when it comes to risque and ethnic humor. Generally it is safer for people in a certain group to make fun of that group over outsiders.

            I think McFarlane uses making fun of brooish guys as a shield for really making risque jokes about minorities. This way he gets to have his cake and eat it too.

          • Um. Okay.
            NewDealer, I know someone who just got some credit for writing gay jokes (you’ll like ’em, I promise!).

            … He’s not gay (although everyone seems to think he, um, “will be”?)

            But that’s not the thing… He’s going to be putting these jokes in the mouth of a guy who is clearly written to be a closeted homosexual.

            So, so, so… to what extent is it more okay to make jokes if you put them in the mouth of a character, and not yourself?

    • My main problem with MacFarlane is the same as with the “South Park” duo — his humor is cruel. I don’t really care all that much if he makes sophomoric jokes about breasts or even “Jews run Hollywood” cracks. (If you’ve got the stones to tell that knee-slapper in the same auditorium as Weinstein, well… okay then, I guess.)

      But tune into any given “Family Guy” and treat yourself to a reliable stream of jokes about how ugly some celebrity is, or fat, or dumb. Because I guess famous people no longer get treated with any basic human decency? I remember nasty, nasty little hahas about Sarah Jessica Parker’s looks, Ellen Barkin’s looks, Kelly McGillis’s looks. (Yes, this indicates that I tune in from time to time, which I will admit makes me a bit of a hypocrite doesn’t it?) Is the meanness really necessary?

      • Concurred

      • I do not agree at all that Parker & Stone’s schtick is cruel. It can be overly full of itself at times, but never cruel.

        • Really? The “Edward James Olmos costume” joke wasn’t cruel? It struck me as unbelievably cruel. Admittedly, I watch it hardly at all, and maybe it’s not typically cruel. But the episodes I’ve caught included one about Al Gore and “man bear pig,” which if not cruel was certainly not very nice, and didn’t seem to have any particular connection to the real Al Gore.

          Anyhow, I don’t particularly care for their humor. But, y’know… different strokes for different folks and all that.

      • Actually I’d say the Parker&Stone humor is distinguished against MacFarlane in that their schtick isn’t so much cruel as it is at times overly self-conscious and perhaps smug. MacFarlane has a smug cruelty to his humor that’s off putting, he just seems to be putting people down for the sake of it, while even in their harshest pieces Parker&Stone seem more inclined to have a nugget of affection for whatever they’re roasting.

        • SP went after FG pretty hard in one episode, likening McFarlane/the writers to a pool of manatees batting around beachballs with words on them to come up with plots, if I remember correctly.

          • I wouldn’t say that it’s not cruel (see, for example, the Paris Hilton episode) as much as the cruelty is usually in service to a sermon that they want to give.

            As someone who agrees with 98% of their sermons, I’m usually more than happy to laugh when the cruelty is sufficiently funny. They have a fairly decent batting average for that part of it.

            Family Guy, on the other hand, doesn’t really have a point. I mean, sure, I’m willing to laugh when the jokes are sufficiently funny… and Seth has a decent batting average for that… but the jokes are never in service to anything except setting up the next joke.

          • Ugh. It’s not just the randomness (I saw that SP, and thought they nailed that); and it’s not just the lazy substitution of pop-culture references for actual jokes (though I hate that most of all); it’s that the only characters on the show that are even intermittently funny are blatant rip-offs of other, better cartoon characters.

            Peter = Homer
            Stewie = The Brain

            I really, really, really dislike FG. And I have tried more than once to get over it, but…nope.

          • In a nutshell, I think FG’s stupidity gets in the way of its brilliance. Well, maybe not brilliance, but intelligence…

          • stupidity gets in the way of its brilliance

            That’s goin’ on my tombstone.

11. Was happy to see our hometown girl (Jennifer Lawrence) win. I hope she’s got a long career ahead of her.

    • She was perfect as Katniss Everdeen.

      • Except for the fact that she didn’t really look anything like the character as described, which was a pretty big issue for a lot of people.

      • And was equally good as a completely different character in Silver Linings Playbook, which is what impresses the heck out of me.

        • this was quite well done, too.

        • I didn’t see those flicks; and I know I have repped it before, but I like to think of it as a delayed win for Winter’s Bone.

          She was phenomenal in that.

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