Seth MacFarlane Is Hosting The Oscars Next Year
When I was a younger person, co-editing a pan-pop culture website, it was easier to keep up with all the media required to maintain my cultural literacy -- TV, movies, celebrity websites, celebrity magazines...books. (Just kidding, we pretty much ignored books. Books are for chumps.) Granted, part of the reason it was easier was that there was less media then -- not nearly as many gossip blogs or TV networks with original programs, and movies that premiere On Demand so that you have no excuse for missing them. And at a certain point, I realized that it was okay to let some sectors of pop culture slide. No longer would I feel obliged to see movies that seemed important or even just big. It would be okay for me to let my Vanity Fair subscription lapse; I could buy buzzy issues at the newsstand, but I didn't expect that to happen very often. And if I wasn't going to be writing something substantial about an award show -- which, at Fametracker, we were kind of obligated to do -- I did not have to watch it. At first, that just meant I could skip the lesser ones -- your Emmys, your Golden Globeses. But then, in 2009, I took a red-eye back from Hawaii, landing the morning of the day the Oscars would air in primetime. Too tired to stay up and watch, I didn't watch live, and by the next day, with all the winners announced and highlights clipped and posted online, there hardly seemed any point to watching my DVR recording. Just like that, my Oscar habit was broken.
For a person who considers herself a voracious pop culture consumer -- which, by any reasonable standard, I still am -- I was surprised by how liberating it was to skip the Oscars. Because guess what: if you just have Twitter open while you're watching whatever else you want -- a Hoarders marathon; a couple of movies (both ways I've passed recent Oscar nights) -- you can not only follow the proceedings, but when they're filtered as 140-character witticisms, they zip along most enjoyably. If you've carefully curated your follows, your Twitter feed is like the world's best Oscar party, in fact! That sounds like a commercial for Twitter, but I am actually being sincere.
I have come back to the Oscars for professional reasons in more recent years, so I guess it's literally true that I will only watch the Academy Awards if you pay me. But this year I might have to subcontract the gig, because the show is going to be hosted by Seth MacFarlane.
Look: we did this. I might like to think I'm not complicit, just because I don't watch any of his premise-alike Fox sitcoms and didn't see Ted. But I watched him on Saturday Night Live, contributing not just to above-average ratings for the show, but also to the evidence that MacFarlane is a credible pop-culture personality. In retrospect, MacFarlane's guest-host performance appears all the more obvious as an award-show host audition: he sang in his monologue, he did celebrity impressions, he didn't appear rattled by the live format, and he didn't screw up his lines. He set us all up, goddammit!
The issue is not that I think MacFarlane's trademark toilet humour is going to degrade the dignity of the Motion Picture Academy or the pomp of the telecast; both could stand to calm down a little about how determinedly serious they are. It's that MacFarlane's trademark toilet humour is so polarizing. People who love him really love him, true, but people who hate him don't hate-watch him, and regardless of how deft his writers are, it seems unlikely that his hosting is going to convert any of his unfans, but we're going to have to deal with him anyway. It's an aggressive, unwelcome move on his part.
I realize that the scale of the Oscars means that abstaining from watching might be a tough decision. (Not for me; for you.) But think it through. We let SNL go by, and this was the result. If the Academy's calculation checks out and MacFarlane's hosting does attract legions of younger viewers, what's his next career move? Starring in his own live-action sitcom? His own weekly variety show? His own nightly talk show?! He could end up even more ubiquitous, and thus his celebrity would be perceived as even more legitimate. That's not an acceptable outcome. So you have a few months to consider your personal responsibility in this matter. Personally, even with my return to Oscar viewership, I can't with this.