(originally published at Open Salon, March 1, 2011)
I love the Oscars. I grew up watching them with my mom. Long before I was old enough to see or understand most of the nominated films, I loved the glitz and glam, the montages of eras gone by, the tributes to the Hollywood legends who’d died that year. Even in my thirties, when I was too surrounded by babies and too broke to go to first-run movies, I would brave sleep deprivation and my husband’s eye rolling to watch until the bitter end. It would never have occurred to me not to.
As a somewhat blind devotee, I’ve been an apologist for plenty of boring hosts over the years. I may have been the only person on the planet who didn’t notice how bad David Letterman was. It was the Oscars. I couldn’t not love it.
So the other night, I snuggled up on the couch with my whole family and settled in for a night of snarking about dresses and cheering for underdogs. The opening montage with the much-ballyhooed fresh-faced hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, was clever enough. But when Franco came out shooting video with his iPhone, I should have known that things had nowhere to go but downhill.
I am not a crabby old traditionalist. I appreciate the fact that the Academy is trying to woo younger viewers. I was game for a change in format. I think both of the young hosts are talented, and I wanted to like them. But really, James Franco? Did it have to be all about you?
I get that he is the talk of the town, a Renaissance Man who writes fiction and gets his PhD and acts and paints and experiments in performance art. But apparently, he was so busy shooting video and Tweeting backstage and making everything very postmodern and ironically detached, he couldn’t be bothered to be entertaining. I think Annie was just overcompensating, poor thing. She came across as silly and cloying and trying too hard, but I can hardly blame her. I think I knew how she felt.
I had a boyfriend in college who was Mr. Cool. He was good looking and aloof and shunned anything remotely trendy. Why he wanted anything to do with me (trendy sorority girl, good student, former show choir member, slightly gawky) I’m not sure. But watching poor Annie Hathaway with the reluctant (or vacant? or absent?) Franco on her arm, I was reminded of the handful of times I took Mr. Cool to a sorority function, or to a family event, or well, basically any time when we weren’t alone together or with friends of his choosing. He’d be rude to my friends or make snide comments about the event or whatever, and I’d get exhausted trying to apologize for him and make everyone see what a great guy he was. (This begs the question why, if he was so great, he acted like such a jerk, but as every young gal with a Bad Boyfriend knows “he was different with me.” The grownup me cringes. I digress.)
Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Franco is talented. Perhaps I should blame the producers for selecting someone so ill-suited to the task. The fact that Billy Crystal, a 94- year-old stroke victim, and a digital Bob Hope were the highlights of the show pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Still, I find that I’m slightly irritated with Franco anyway.
What I loved about the Oscars when I was a kid was that it celebrated everything great about movie making. I would watch actors accept their awards and imagine doing the same one day. Last night, I watched with my 15-year-old daughter, who is just back from her first trip to New York and completely in love with the theater. I wonder if she imagined the same. Say what you will about Academy politics and Hollywood cynicism and promotional campaigns and whether the most deserving “art” wins. The Oscars, at their best, are a lovely fantasy, and they honor good work. For Franco to make the evening about anything other than the honorees was colossally self-indulgent. On Oscar night, I’m not interested in performance art or sly meta commentary that blurs the lines between audience and host, breaks the fourth wall, blah blah blah. I just want to be entertained. For the first time in my Oscar viewing years, I wasn’t. But then maybe I’m just grumpy because I stayed up too late, True Grit didn’t get a single award, and not even Annette Benning could stem the Portman tidal wave. Sigh.
I love the Oscars. I grew up watching them with my mom. Long before I was old enough to see or understand most of the nominated films, I loved the glitz and glam, the montages of eras gone by, the tributes to the Hollywood legends who’d died that year. Even in my thirties, when I was too surrounded by babies and too broke to go to first-run movies, I would brave sleep deprivation and my husband’s eye rolling to watch until the bitter end. It would never have occurred to me not to.
As a somewhat blind devotee, I’ve been an apologist for plenty of boring hosts over the years. I may have been the only person on the planet who didn’t notice how bad David Letterman was. It was the Oscars. I couldn’t not love it.
So the other night, I snuggled up on the couch with my whole family and settled in for a night of snarking about dresses and cheering for underdogs. The opening montage with the much-ballyhooed fresh-faced hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, was clever enough. But when Franco came out shooting video with his iPhone, I should have known that things had nowhere to go but downhill.
I am not a crabby old traditionalist. I appreciate the fact that the Academy is trying to woo younger viewers. I was game for a change in format. I think both of the young hosts are talented, and I wanted to like them. But really, James Franco? Did it have to be all about you?
I get that he is the talk of the town, a Renaissance Man who writes fiction and gets his PhD and acts and paints and experiments in performance art. But apparently, he was so busy shooting video and Tweeting backstage and making everything very postmodern and ironically detached, he couldn’t be bothered to be entertaining. I think Annie was just overcompensating, poor thing. She came across as silly and cloying and trying too hard, but I can hardly blame her. I think I knew how she felt.
I had a boyfriend in college who was Mr. Cool. He was good looking and aloof and shunned anything remotely trendy. Why he wanted anything to do with me (trendy sorority girl, good student, former show choir member, slightly gawky) I’m not sure. But watching poor Annie Hathaway with the reluctant (or vacant? or absent?) Franco on her arm, I was reminded of the handful of times I took Mr. Cool to a sorority function, or to a family event, or well, basically any time when we weren’t alone together or with friends of his choosing. He’d be rude to my friends or make snide comments about the event or whatever, and I’d get exhausted trying to apologize for him and make everyone see what a great guy he was. (This begs the question why, if he was so great, he acted like such a jerk, but as every young gal with a Bad Boyfriend knows “he was different with me.” The grownup me cringes. I digress.)
Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Franco is talented. Perhaps I should blame the producers for selecting someone so ill-suited to the task. The fact that Billy Crystal, a 94- year-old stroke victim, and a digital Bob Hope were the highlights of the show pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Still, I find that I’m slightly irritated with Franco anyway.
What I loved about the Oscars when I was a kid was that it celebrated everything great about movie making. I would watch actors accept their awards and imagine doing the same one day. Last night, I watched with my 15-year-old daughter, who is just back from her first trip to New York and completely in love with the theater. I wonder if she imagined the same. Say what you will about Academy politics and Hollywood cynicism and promotional campaigns and whether the most deserving “art” wins. The Oscars, at their best, are a lovely fantasy, and they honor good work. For Franco to make the evening about anything other than the honorees was colossally self-indulgent. On Oscar night, I’m not interested in performance art or sly meta commentary that blurs the lines between audience and host, breaks the fourth wall, blah blah blah. I just want to be entertained. For the first time in my Oscar viewing years, I wasn’t. But then maybe I’m just grumpy because I stayed up too late, True Grit didn’t get a single award, and not even Annette Benning could stem the Portman tidal wave. Sigh.