According to Deadline, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the producers of the Academy Awards, apparently have mistaken a flat, ugly Oscars hosting performance by Seth MacFarlane for “relevance,” and asked him back to host again next year. Given that part of the reason MacFarlane was asked to host this year is because he has a side musical career and this was supposed to be a salute to the Oscars in music, an idea that was conveyed much better by Shirley Bassey straight killing it than by anything MacFarlane himself did, I wonder what the rationale is this time around. Is it going to be a salute to animation, a kind of filmmaking the Academy has traditionally refused to treat as if it’s as serious as live-action movies, hosted by a bunch of MacFarlane’s creations?

Word in Deadline’s story is that we might be saved a repeat if only because MacFarlane already said no to coming back, and because he’s very, very busy doing other things that will make him much more money. But in any case, that Zadan and Meron would ask again has me hoping that someone is smart enough to hire Retta to live-snark the ceremony MSTK3000-style. It may be the only way I get through this thing next year.

After an Academy Awards ceremony that seemed to be programmed out of the conviction that the best way to improve the relevance of the movies is to emphasize its most profitable work rather than its most, well, relevant, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to have surprised a number of its members by sending out invitations to meetings in three cities to discuss what the Academy does and ought to do. That this is happening seems entirely reasonable and sensible, and so the really newsworthy element surrounding all of this is that Academy members the New York Times talked to seem to be surprised and disconcerted that it’s happening:

In the last few years the Academy, which presents the Oscars, has been the subject of almost constant hand-wringing concerning the quality and ratings of its annual awards show, the age and ethnic diversity of its membership, and efforts to shore up the cultural relevance of film. Still, the group has rarely, if ever, opened the door for a global discussion of its aims or operation. Mr. Koch did not respond to a query about the meeting on Friday, and a spokeswoman for the Academy declined to comment. Several Academy members who have been active in the awards process said on Friday that they were puzzled by the announcement. One highly placed studio executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the Academy, said he believed it was an attempt by Ms. Hudson, who has held her post for about two years, to get input from members as she and others plot their agenda.

I guess it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that the 94 percent of Academy voters who are white and the 77 percent of them who are men might not really want to talk about the fact that they’re an overwhelming majority. But it’s a nice test of how committed actual folks are to their values to see if they’re willing to discuss their privilege and to consider measures that would dilute them. And after the Academy Awards’ schizophrenic pendulum swings between hosts from different generations and senses of what are the most effective ways to emphasize the importance of the movies, it makes sense to stage an actual conversation rather than leaving things in the hands of producers who don’t seem to be coming up with good solutions on their own. Good on Academy president Hawk Koch and chief executive Dawn Hudson for saving the dates. Now it’ll be up to their members to actually contribute, rather than act like it’s bizarre that an organization would attempt to reassess itself.

An incredibly easy way to test whether someone is in a defensive crouch is whether or not they’re claiming that all publicity is good publicity. And the producers of the Academy Awards are doing precisely that after a widely-maligned ceremony hosted by comedian Seth MacFarlane.

“People have complained for years and years that the Oscars were becoming irrelevant,” Neil Meron told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think what we did this year is to really make them part of the cultural conversation, and I think that’s the important part that people will take away.”

It’s awfully depressing that the ambitions for a production with a purported billion-person audience that’s meant to celebrate an industry that creates internationally compelling images and stories is to be “part of the cultural conversation.” Hosting awards shows is a difficult thing, requiring the hosts to be funny, potentially to be musical depending on the show, to frame guest presenters artfully, to act in sketches, to switch tones effectively between humor and honor. That’s not an easy mix of skills to find in a single person, and I understand why there are so many failures to design effective ceremonies, and why people like Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg end up hosting so frequently.

But in a good awards ceremony, the content itself ought to be the news, and the host’s primary job should be to showcase the content. And if you have good content, particularly that which represents conflicting viewpoints and styles, which was the case at this year’s Academy Awards, that content should propel you into the news cycle. The contrasts between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and between Django Unchained and Lincoln alone should have been enough to generate a compelling drive towards the end of the evening. And if Meron and company weren’t interested in making the event into a competition, then why not stick with their theme, which was music in the movies? It could have been a way of narrowing the host’s tasks, and the kind of guests that the producers needed to recruit. But then, if you’re going to screw up the sound mixing on Adele’s performance, maybe that wasn’t a good idea either. At minimum, I’d hope the ceremony could have the same technical competence as the movies it’s celebrating.

Cable news gets a bad rap for being truncated and sound-bitey, but the kind people at Al Jazeera was nice enough to ask me and a couple of other critics to come on and discuss the results of the Academy Awards—for 25 minutes:

For all the talk about the billion people who theoretically tune into the Academy Awards, there’s very little conversation about the overall international reaction to the results, unless a win sparks off a very particular reaction, as was the case with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film statuette for A Separation. I don’t agree with everything my fellow panelists said, but it was fascinating to hear how Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are playing outside the United States.

Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see his take on the debates about what makes something funny, or not, in the wake of Sunday’s Oscar-related controversies. I was particularly struck by this section, and the question Hulk poses in it, after which he goes on to discuss the creation of comedic personas and the balance of revelation and harm in individual jokes, but that I wanted to take in a different direction:

COMEDY CREATES INHERENT DIVISIONS OF THOSE INSIDE THE JOKE AND THOSE OUTSIDE. AND QUITE FRANKLY, YOUR REACTION LARGELY DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU RELATE MORE TO THE MAKER OF THE JOKE OR THE VICTIM. OFTEN COMEDY IS CONSIDERED THE MOST PALATABLE BY SOCIETY WHEN IT’S IN THE FORM OF LIGHT RIBBING AND INCLUSIVE LAUGHTER, A COMIC RAKING OF THEMSELVES OVER THE SAME COALS AS YOU OR HULK. BUT ALSO WITH PURPOSE IS THE COMEDY OF SCATHING INDICTMENT, WHETHER DIRECTED AT SOCIAL MORES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. BUT WHAT RESONATES WITH AN AUDIENCE IS LARGELY DEPENDENT ON THE COMEDIAN’S INTENT.

SO IN A WORLD WHERE WE ARE FREQUENTLY BOTH PERPETRATORS OR VICTIMS OF COMEDY DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGY, WHAT UNIVERSAL APTITUDE DO WE HAVE TO TELLS US WHEN A LINE OF COMEDY IS OKAY? HULK KNOWS WE CAN’T DICTATE THE TERMS OF “WHAT” CAN ACTUALLY BE SAID, BUT WHAT MAKES OFFENSE PALATABLE?

One thing I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently is the unique and contradictory ways in which we seem to react to jokes. I think we generally understand that there is not a normative definition of what is frightening and what is not because most of us have been exposed to the lessons of Room 101, the place in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where prisoners are exposed to “the worst thing in the world”—which happens to be different for everybody. When we look at paintings in a museum, no one has a problem with the idea that some of us are going to respond more strongly to Michaelangelo or to Robert Rauschenberg. And internet commenters aside, we tend to recognize that there are a lot of kinds of physical beauty it’s possible to respond to.

But we also recognize that if a movie, television show, or book fails to achieve what the author seems to have intended, including in cases where those pieces of art—be it intentional or unintentional—glorify sexual assault, racism, or violence, we’re allowed to critique its creator without being accused of violating the First Amendment. But criticize a comedian, whether he’s standing on a club stage, soft-shoeing in front of the Dolby Theater audience on Oscar night, or Tweeting from an institutional account, and a different set of rules seem to apply. The act of criticism is taken as proof that the critic speaking lacks critical judgement. We’re told that comedians get a pass because their job isn’t to make people comfortable, but to speak difficult truths—but if that is their privilege, we’re also not allowed to ask questions about whether or not they’re fulfilling that responsibility. Criticisms that suggest that jokes were cliche, ineffective, or fail to live up to the standards that are invoked to argue that comedians deserve special protection get recast as evidence of bias or humorlessness. A perfect example of this is how frequently feminist calls for rape jokes to be constructed precisely and their targets to be chosen with care are recast as evidence that feminists don’t understand comedy. Unlike every other form of pop culture, comedy seems to have a special status. At one stroke, the idea that people are allowed to have multiple opinions is invalidated, and replaced by the idea that there is an objective correct view of any joke—that it’s funny, and the comedian was correct to make it.

This is a rotten state of affairs for any number of reasons. It’s an incorrect and unproductive interpretation of the First Amendment, one that suggests that the right to speak also includes the right to be free from judgement and criticism, a profound distortion of the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. A related problem, as my friend, Salon TV critic Willa Paskin, put it a conversation between us, is the presumption in many of these discussions that it’s a normative good that we shatter all taboos, simply for the sake of shattering them. It’s an attempt to shut down discussion, which is always a sign of intellectual anxiety. And it denies people who are doing comedy a discussion of efficacy and joke construction that could help sharpen their material, which you’d think would be sad for them, or for any artist. Immunity is rarely a helpful state for people who want to grow in any professional capacity. And if we’re going to give a class of people extra credit for calling out societal hypocrisy and harm—an argument defenders of comedians under fire often employ—of course we have an interest in making sure that they’re actually doing that job, not just hiding behind the job description, and doing it well.
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Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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Seth MacFarlane’s performance as an Oscar host last night was a perfect advertisement for MacFarlane’s brand of humor. He opened with a number about the fact that he—and we as audiences—have seen female Academy Award nominees’ breasts. It was a bit that could have been a perceptive riff about the fact that women are asked to get naked, and to get naked in different ways, than their male counterparts, and could have tweaked the 77 percent of Academy voters who are men for voting for those roles, rather than recognizing female actors for performances that are non-sexual. Instead, he went in an entirely different direction that made for a faster, but not nearly as deep joke, bringing in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. A comedic sensibility that goes to Boobs + Gay Men Who Don’t Like Boobs = Hilarity may be commercially viable, but it’s as fleeting as adolescence.

From there, MacFarlane dug in as hard as he could have on one of the few comedic lanes he’s capable of working in. He used Quvenzhané Wallis, who is nine, to make a joke about George Clooney’s fondness for dating younger women, then tossed him a drink as if to reassure one of Hollywood’s most powerful and respected actors that he’d never actually make a crack at Clooney‘s expense. He suggested that Jennifer Anniston is hiding a past as a stripper. He made jokes about actresses throwing up to fit into their dresses. He thought it was funny that Javier Bardem has an accent. I’m no Chris Brown fan, but even MacFarlane’s joke about Brown was badly constructed, saying “Django is a movie where a woman is subjected to violence, or as we call it, a Chris Brown and Rihanna date movie,” ignoring the fact that Django is a movie where a woman of color is subjected to tremendous violence by white men and saved by a heroic black man who is taking on a chivalric role that was previously specifically reserved for white men.

What bothers me more than anything else about these jokes is how boring they are. I’ve heard variations of them countless times from people who think they’re hilarious, and act as if no one has ever unearthed such comedic gems before, and they’re always wrong. They are the scraps of humor actual comics left on the table a decade earlier in their careers after they learned that playing to people’s dumbest, most stereotypical assumptions is not actually the same thing as joke-making. But the laziness of MacFarlane’s brand played particularly poorly at the Oscars given the movie industry’s very real problems with both women and derivativeness, in a celebration of what’s supposed to be Hollywood’s best, the things that the profits of things like The Avengers make it possible to keep in production.
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11:49: Daniel Day-Lewis is an exceedingly dull choice for Best Actor, but at least the man gives good, and gracious speech on a night in which the speeches have been totally unremarkable.

11:43: Jennifer Lawrence’s win for Best Actress in Silver Linings Playbook is one of the least interesting choices in the field, but at least it’s one in a field packed with interesting options. And I appreciated Lawrence’s performance as a woman who was intensely aware of and pained by the perception that she was promiscuous. Her defense of herself against slut-shaming, and discussions of the pendulum between feeling sexually shut down by depression and embracing sex as a way to feel alive in the midst of great grief is very strong and interesting. That said, I really thought Jessica Chastain’s performance as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty was remarkable, and even better for elevating one of the most original roles written for a woman in a very long time. I would have liked to see her win for that role if only as an incentive for people to create more of those kinds of parts for women, which men can take for granted, in which they can be about their work, and accomplishments, and drive, rather than about their partner.

11:35: It’s hard for me to see the Best Director category as even remotely legitimate or interesting this year given the absence of Quentin Tarantino and Kathryn Bigelow from the competition. I like Lee a whole bunch. But this seems like a very, very tame choice.

11:26: Django Unchained is too long and deeply self-indulgent. But of the movies that were up against it for Best Original Screenplay, Django was playing with a lot of tremendous difficult and resonant ideas. And on questions of race, it was a much more confrontational and interesting movie than Lincoln.

11:24: I said way back that I thought Argo was a lock to win best picture. With its win for Best Adapted Screenplay, I’m increasingly sure I’m right.

10:38: Now I kind of want to see Adele get to be a Bond Woman, instead of just see the theme. Maybe one who is essentially impervious to Bond’s charms.

10:24: Anne Hathaway wins for Best Supporting Actress for Les Miserables. Which is fine with me. I find the dislike of her entirely mysterious. But it’s a real shame that Amy Adams didn’t get recognized for her fascinating, angry turn as a cult leader’s wife in The Master. Even more than Jessica Chastain’s turn in Zero Dark Thirty, Adams played a character who was essentially without vanity, who came at female sexuality from an extreme and fascinating slant, and who was finding ways to exert power in a male-dominated environment.

9:44: Searching For Sugarman is good, but I’m incredibly disappointed that the Academy didn’t go for The Invisible War or How To Survive A Plague. The Invisible War, Kirby Dick’s documentary about the rape epidemic in the U.S. military, would have been my pick. It’s an incredibly damning movie that’s actually made a lot of change, coming up in Chuck Hagel’s nomination hearing to be Secretary of Defense, and it’s been adopted by the Defense Department as a training tool. But I wouldn’t be shocked if a lot of Academy voters were turned off or made uncomfortable by how blunt and upsetting it is.

9:22: I’m enjoying the James Bond montage, but sorry to see Skyfall get so little love. The movie was really as clever a genre riff—and commentary on the British Empire and blowback—as anything Joss Whedon does with science fiction and fantasy.

9:16: Aaaand Seth MacFarlane implies that Jennifer Anniston has a secret stripper past. Seriously, bro? Fire your writers. Which probably means you should fire yourself.

9:11: Nice to see a Hollywood spouse get thanked for the sacrifices she’s made.

9:01: Reese Witherspoon’s self-congratulation of the Academy for recognizing the originality of Beasts of the Southern Wild says a lot more about the Academy’s treatment of African-American characters as niche than about Beasts itself.

8:58: Paperman, which just won Best Animated Short, is a tremendous little movie, and a great critique of what’s wrong with most romantic comedies. And you can watch it here!

8:50: Christoph Waltz wins Best Supporting Actor for Django Unchained. It’s a great performance, not least because Dr. King Schultz is a character who was created as an opportunity to explore whiteness as a racial category, and racial solidarity, an issue that almost never appears on screen.

8:47: That the actors who are nominated for Best Supporting Actor have been nominated a combined 21 times before is…not actually an admirable statistic for Hollywood. It’s a great testament to the concentration of good roles among an extremely small crew of people working in the industry.

8:37: Seth MacFarlane bringing in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles to sing a number about seeing nominated actresses topless was a move that came close to working. But you don’t get points for self-awareness for that sort of number unless you acknowledge that almost no actor in Hollywood is ever expected to prove he’s serious by showing us his man-bits.
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If you’ll be watching the Academy Awards on Sunday, swing by here at 8:30. I’ll be liveblogging awards, speeches, and whether the sheer force of Anne Hathaway’s emoting or Seth MacFarlane’s snark melt down the Dolby Theater.

Yesterday, Deadline ran a piece considering the impact of politics on the 2013 Oscar race, assessing factors from Congressional scrutiny of Zero Dark Thirty to various historical quibbles over Lincoln. Argo, the piece suggests, has one of the strongest campaigns linking the film to real-world events, and to real-world endorsers (though it’s sparked some quibbles by Canadians):

For Argo’s end credits former President Jimmy Carter turns up in an audio interview basically confirming the facts of the CIA mission he approved to get six American hostages out of the Canadian Embassy in Iran by creating a fake movie production. It was a very effective way of validating the events of the film set in 1979 and giving it added gravitas. It also didn’t hurt the film’s awards chances to have Tony Mendez, the real life CIA operative who hatched the scheme (and played by director Ben Affleck) appearing everywhere in praise of the film.

Even more than this roster of praise, the consensus seems to be that Argo, a relatively slight but definitely entertaining picture, racked up a string of awards season victories and became the leading contender for Best Picture at the Academy Awards because it’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood feel good about itself. The ability to create fantasies compelling enough to make an audience suspend disbelief isn’t just a source of joy, the movie argues. It can be a service to the Republic!

But I think Argo has emerged as the consensus contender for Best Picture for even stronger reasons than that. In a pool of strongly politically themed-movies, Argo is at the intersection of two important trend lines. It has a gloss of relevance, but the movie exists at a safe distance from actual events, and from shameful, damaging policies, that remain the subject of heated political debate. For all that we talk about Hollywood liberalism, the Academy appears to be converging around a movie that allows us to feel as good as possible about the way the United States handles the blowback of our foreign policy.

The contrast between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty is the most obvious point of comparison between Argo and its other competitors, but it’s important. Where Tony Mendez, the CIA analyst who is the main character in Argo is safely a historical figure, an inventive hero by consensus before he became a Hollywood story, the CIA analyst who is the basis for Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) still works at the agency. More to the point, though, is that the tactics Mendez employed—convincing the Iranian government that he was shooting a wacky science fiction picture and smuggling out escapees from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran under the cover of that project—is amusing and anodyne, tradecraft that is only impeachable if you think that it’s wrong to lie to people in the name of espionage, which would be an awfully confusing position. The tactics Maya uses, on the other hand, include torture. It’s not fun to watch her watch a man be waterboarded, sexually humiliated, and beaten in the same way it’s fun to watch Tony jauntily fake a table read for his Trojan Horse of a movie. It requires a great deal more work to dig out what Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal want you to think about those horrendously uncomfortable scenes than it does to sit back, relax, and enjoy Affleck, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman engage in wacky, ethically clear hijinks. And where Argo gives us permission to revel in its finale, in which a commercial airliner races jeeps full of Iranian intelligence officers off a Tehran tarmac, Zero Dark Thirty withholds permission to enjoy an event that gave a lot of people a lot of pride in real life, the killing of Osama bin Laden, by turning that sequence into a tense, workmanlike effort that traumatizes a great many children.
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