Seth Macfarlane gave viewers an early taste of what next month’s Oscars are going to be like with him at the hosting helm when announcing the nominations for the February event yesterday (February 10, 2013); however, it sounds like people are already having to defend him after a couple of risky jokes during the presentation yesterday.
Macfarlane was alongside Emma Stone in Los Angeles yesterday to read out the nominees, and the Family Guy and Ted creator dropped a couple of dodgy jokes, including: "These are adapted screenplays, keep in mind, so that means the writers just copied stuff from Microsoft Word and pasted it into Final Draft," and "I read 'Amour' was co-produced in Austria and Germany. The last time Austria and Germany got together and co-produced something it was Hitler, but this was much better."
His performance did not go down well: “David Letterman, you can probably stop making jokes about how much the movie industry disliked your host gig; a new winner in that category may reveal itself on Oscar night” wrote Entertainment Weekly. Slate meanwhile commented “In the less than 10 minutes it took to announce the nominees, MacFarlane managed to insult his co-presenter, belittle the achievements of several nominees, and make a Hitler joke....” Vulture blog meanwhile commented how conflicted he looked, commenting “You could see MacFarlane struggling to figure out how to seem like the guy whose show had a baby putting horse semen on his cereal, but not actually offend the more conservative Oscar audience.”
So how’s Macfarlane going to pull this round? Maybe he won’t, maybe he’ll go the Ricky Gervais/Golden Globes route of verbally assassinating everyone so that he can preempt the inevitable horrified reaction. However, the Golden Globes is a less formal, looser affair than the Oscars, and you can’t imagine that the proud tradition and decorum of the event would suit something like that at all. Yesterday the smooth-talking comedian perhaps woke up and realized that the task he’d been handed may well be a little more daunting than he’d at first envisaged.
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