Seth MacFarlane: Oscar Hero Or Lame Duck?

Seth MacFarlane: Oscar Hero Or Lame Duck?

Posted on Monday February 25, 2013, 05:21 by Phil de Semlyen in Empire States

“From Whoopi all the way down to Ron Jeremy, it’s an honour that everyone else said no,” grinned a visibly nervy Seth MacFarlane at Oscars zero hour. A few minutes later you could sense people backstage fumbling for Jeremy’s number, hoping that the man could free himself from whatever torrid triste he was engaged in at the time to save the day as the Family Guy guy dropped clunker after clunker on the Oscars.

First there was a sur-le-nez remark about Jean Dujardin’s post-Oscars career lull that was undercut hilariously by the man himself about, what, nine months ago on Funny Or Die. If that seemed a little cheap, the riff on Daniel Day-Lewis’ in-character methods on Lincoln (“If you'd seen Don Cheadle on set, would you have had to free him?”, he asked the perplexed Brit) and a sock puppet version of Flight that culminated in him deliberately confusing Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy both crashed in at the Birth Of A Nation end of the race relations comedy spectrum. Points awarded for only making one Rihanna/Chris Brown crack were swiftly annulled by a Mel Gibson gag that literally no-one laughed at.

And then, just as Team Empire was pondering which fist to cram into its collective gob first, salvation of sorts arrived from the sky. William Shatner – clad (kinda) in his Captain Kirk finery – called a halt to proceeding from a giant plasma screen, pointing MacFarlane to tomorrow’s ‘Worst Host Ever’ headlines and suggesting some improvements. It was a Back To The Future-meets-Looper-meets-god-knows-what MacFarlane ploy that reset a show that was wobbling like a jelly. In our sleep-deprived state it all felt like that trippy bit with the tunnel in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, but MacFarlane’s bait-and-switch ploy seemed to be working, especially during the loopy ‘We Saw Your Boobs’ song-and-dance number.

So, did he pull it round and emulate his role-models, Mssrs Carson, Crystal and Hope, as a beloved custodian of Hollywood’s collective id? Well, yes and no. “No-one’s got inside Lincoln’s head better than John Wilkes Booth” isn’t exactly a line you could imagine Bob Hope delivering and there was a weird bit with a Nazi and a fire escape (don’t ask), but his ad-libs, perhaps a better showcase for a razor-edged mind, were genuinely funny. The night’s sacred calf, Ben Affleck, came in for some flak (“The first time I saw that luscious beard I thought, ‘My god, the Kardashians have finally made the leap to film’”), as did ‘70s Hollywood and its cocaine trees.

That was about as good as it got. The early stuff had a spontaneous quality – in the sense that no-one involved seemed to have even met before, let alone rehearsed – but MacFarlane’s edginess infected everyone involved, from safe hands like Melissa McCarthy and Paul Rudd to an entire Avengers line-up who croaked out a confusing skit that touched on RDJ’s drugs past and Samuel L. Jackson’s “decade... decade-and-a-half” of raw hedonism. There was a spiel prepared on the magic of VFX but, oddly, Nick Fury kibooshed it, presumably because he had a kebab to get to. A minute later and the Life Of Pi team was being played off mid-way through a tribute to the movie’s now-bankrupt effects house by the music from Jaws. “300 people went into work, 17 came out,” etc.

What saved the day was the night’s co-host, The Musical, as Hollywood took the chance to get its MGM on. The night’s musical blitzkrieg was spearheaded by nuclear-lunged songstress Dame Shirley Bassey, Catherine Zeta-Jones reprising ‘All That Jazz’ from Chicago, Hugh Jackman and the Les Miser-Warblers doing a Harlem Songtrotters ensemble, Babs doing ‘Memories’ and Adele doing ‘Crumble’. It all left MacFarlane’s segments in the shade a little, which for all his occasional qualities, probably wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

Maybe the real question is when the dust settles on a pretty ho-hum Oscars night is whether hosting the awards has joined England manager and Lance Armstrong’s chemist as The Impossible Job? He or she has to be edgy enough to arrest a slide in ratings from 57m in 1997 to 39m last year, homespun enough to avoid offending some pretty thin-skinned folk, and inventive enough to make words likes ‘imagination’, ‘magic’ and ‘Meryl Streep’ seem fresh at the 10 bajillionth time of asking. Even Ron Jeremy would struggle to pull that off.