Author Topic: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars  (Read 29619 times)

Offline Monika

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #50 on: February 28, 2011, 05:34:29 pm »


Anne and James had chemistry to spare in the promos that were leaked on YouTube, so what happened at the event? Stage fright? I doubt it. Maybe James got some bad news just before going on stage, like the Brokeback Mountain cast got an hour or so before the announcement that Crash had won.
Bad news?

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #51 on: February 28, 2011, 06:37:41 pm »




"As for James Franco, I think possibly the reason he became more and more sub-dude as the evening went on was because--"





One of the best thrown away best one-liners ever,  Lee!





Bad news?





Likewise, Monika!

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #52 on: February 28, 2011, 06:47:02 pm »




I didn't check the credits, but Bruce Vilanch used to write for the host(s) in the past.  They could have used his one-liners, for sure.




Paul, I didn't check the credits either, but I thought  reading somewhere that Mr. Vilanch was involved. Oh well.




I noticed several winners thanking their "UNION" crew, with emphasis. 




Nice!




So glad that Colin Firth thanked Tom Ford, as I thought he should have won last year for "A Single Man". 




Yes!


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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline oilgun

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #53 on: February 28, 2011, 07:07:33 pm »
The Oscar telecast was mind-numbingly awful.  I actually went to bed before the Best Film announcement. At least now we know there is at least one thing James Franco isn't good at, lol!  Anne Hathaway fared better but I think they should stick with comedians as hosts.  Anyway, it was the most lifeless show yet, almost funereal.   I wanted to kiss Melissa Leo for dropping that F-bomb, finally something unscripted and unexpected!  It didn't help that there were no surprise wins.  Have we witnessed the death of the Oscars?  Even the red carpet (ABC) was sleep inducing. I can't believe I missed Spartacus for that! 

Offline Katie77

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #54 on: February 28, 2011, 07:41:38 pm »
I thought Anne was wonderful. She unashamedly showed a nervous excitement of the job she had at hand, and I think her smiles and her laughs were spontaneous. She didnt act silly, her admiration for the other actors on stage, was genuine, and all in all she behaved like a lady.

James Franco, on the other hand, was straight faced and boring. He gave me the impression that he was trying to act "cool" about the whole thing, but it came out as very very deadpan.

The appearance of Billy Crystal was great, with his usual funny lines. He was probably the most "at ease" person who came on the stage.

Cate Blanchett was the most beautiful and natural presenter of the show.

And Colin Firth's speech, such a mixture  of formality and comedy...he is brilliant.
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Offline oilgun

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #55 on: February 28, 2011, 08:09:03 pm »
I still love James Franco, don't get me wrong, but I did enjoy reading this Salon piece:

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/02/28/oscars_2001_telecast/index.html


James Franco's Oscars of apathy
Anne Hathaway's co-host spent last night in a daze. What was he thinking? Let this short story explain

[...]
"Or maybe, Franco thought gloomily, returning to the worst-case scenario, the problem was him.

Maybe if Franco had supported Hathaway more, if he'd given more of a damn -- if he hadn't looked distracted half the time and pained the other half; if he'd roused himself to display the smarmy but irresistible energy that Crystal brought to his sole brief appearance, or that Hope radiated from beyond the grave -- maybe Franco wouldn't be standing there on the precipice of infamy, about to be reviled as the guy who sucked worse than Letterman and Whoopi, the yutz who made the Oscars even more boring than they might have been already, just by being his "Am I really there or not?" self, the handsome Mr. Cellophane.

Maybe, Franco thought, there's more to entertainment than just being in the room. Maybe performance is more than a concept to be explored via metafiction and academic jazzing-around. Maybe you just plant your feet and say your line with some energy and try to connect with the audience and hope it works. Maybe it's as simple as flipping a switch: Decide to give a damn and you give a damn, and the audience does, too."

Offline southendmd

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #56 on: February 28, 2011, 08:20:47 pm »
Is it time to change your avatar, Gil? 

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #57 on: February 28, 2011, 10:21:07 pm »





"If I host the worst Oscar show in the history of the Oscars, like, what do I care, you know what I mean?" he said earlier this month. Okay, but then why accept the gig in the first place?





http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/james_franco_now_what.html




James Franco:
Now What?
By: Kyle Buchanan
2/28/11 at 1:30 PM



Since last night's stumper of an Academy Awards telecast, a lot of pundits have claimed that it was folly to ever choose James Franco as a host, and that producers should have foreseen that Franco's low-energy and smirking detachment would prove a poor fit for the Oscars. They're wrong, and they're forgetting about 2009 — that's the year that Hugh Jackman emceed the ceremony (another unexpected selection), and though he did a terrific job, the night was stolen by a fully committed Franco, who brought the house down when he reprised his Pineapple Express  character with Seth Rogen in a funny pretaped bit. To watch that clip now is almost startling: Franco is so high-energy, so loose and winning (he's actually funnier in the skit than the more conventionally comedic Rogen), and even when the two actors eventually come out onstage together, Franco looks fresh and happy to be there in a way he simply wasn't last night. So what happened to him since then — and what happens to him now?

The first question is easy to answer: Since that ceremony just two short years ago, James Franco has become "James Franco," an actor whose primary vocation is deconstructing his own celebrity. Aside from that Oscar appearance, Franco's sole onscreen credit for the rest of 2009 was his truly unexpected stint on General Hospital,  which established him in the public eye as someone operating on his own irreverent wavelength. After that, Franco committed to so many odd extracurriculars that he became a constant headline-generator, yet he seemed so blasé and opaque about each of those ventures that the more we knew about him, the less we really got to know him.

It's fine for a young leading man to want to do things other than acting — hell, it's practically mandatory for the new breed of "intellectual hotties" like Ryan Gosling, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Franco to prove their bona fides by setting up a side career or two — but when you seem that uninterested in being a movie star, it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Franco actually managed to set aside his self-reflexive celebrity this past fall with his meaty one-man show in 127 Hours,  but he promptly undercut it by agreeing to host the Oscarcast where he knew he'd be nominated, pulling focus from his actual performance as an actor and bringing things back to his now-primary brand of pop performance art. And for what? "If I host the worst Oscar show in the history of the Oscars, like, what do I care, you know what I mean?" he said earlier this month. Okay, but then why accept the gig in the first place?

If Franco wanted to further his image as an intellectual prankster-poet who sees Three's Company  and the Academy Awards and thinks, "Same diff, whatever," he probably succeeded last night. However, it's his career as an actor that could use a little TLC in the ceremony's wake. He'll next be seen in Your Highness,  which is the perfect extension of his wink-wink persona (though ironically, he's playing the committed Anne Hathaway type to the postmodern, not-even-trying Danny McBride), but after that, he's toplining the big-budget Fox tentpole Rise of the Apes.  Now that we've seen Franco take the piss out of his whole leading-man act, can we buy him as a hunky scientist who unwittingly creates super-intelligent talking monkeys, or will it all play as one long Funny or Die sketch?

Hollywood is more forgiving than you might think to actors who indulge in long-term self-satirization: Though Joaquin Phoenix essentially blew up his persona and frittered away his public goodwill in I'm Still Here,  as soon as he finally admitted it was all a stunt, big films like Hoover  and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter  came calling. (One cause for concern, though: He still hasn't picked a new project.) A-list directors will continue to want to work with Franco over the next year, even if the general public has soured on him somewhat since last night's ceremony, and even if his coming ubiquity (in addition to the four other films he has coming out this year, he's got an album due at some point ) might exacerbate that backlash.

Still, maybe it's time for Franco to stop playing himself in the public eye, especially when that role is getting a little stale. An eternal college student, Franco's intellectual curiosity and willingness to subvert expectations is commendable, but everyone's gotta graduate sooner or later.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #58 on: February 28, 2011, 11:07:10 pm »





Oscars 2009:
James Franco and Seth Rogen
'Pineapple' skit

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVUnpE6UkSY[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVUnpE6UkSY




It is  funny. Also, see 1:57 - 2:13.  

I'm just sayin'.

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Anne Hathaway, James Franco to host Oscars
« Reply #59 on: March 01, 2011, 06:43:03 am »


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/movies/awardsseason/01oscar.html?_r=1&ref=arts




Younger Audience Still Eludes the Oscars
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
Published: February 28, 2011




James Franco and Anne Hathaway, the co-hosts of the 83rd Academy Awards.


LOS ANGELES — The Oscars tripped in their transition to a hipper, younger, media-mad future, attracting 12 percent fewer viewers than last year in the important 18-to-49 age bracket.

Early ratings results for Sunday night’s broadcast of the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony on ABC pointed toward an overall audience of 37.6 million, about 4 million viewers short of last year’s 41.7 million.

In a year when ratings for the Grammys, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl were all up, the bright, new Twitter-fingered Oscars were down. Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the awards and produces the telecast, was not ready to concede defeat, however. “I think it’s a beginning — everything needs to start somewhere,” Mr. Sherak said in a telephone interview. “Something didn’t work? Let’s try to fix it.”

The viewership figures mean that these annual movie awards are still chugging along as a spectacle one-third the size of the Super Bowl, almost as big as a good playoff game and down about 34 percent from their own contemporary ratings peak, in 1998, when “Titanic” helped deliver more than 57 million viewers.

But even these soft ratings may go down as an achievement, given the forces and flubs that threatened to sink the show after a season so trying that even Scott Rudin — a producer who had both “The Social Network” and “True Grit” among the best picture nominees — decided to stay home in New York rather than attend.

Mr. Rudin was tied up with previews for his Broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon,” as well as the first weekend of shooting in New York on “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” A film directed by Stephen Daldry.

Having moved on, Mr. Rudin missed being there to watch a film distributed by his sometime business rival Harvey Weinstein take the best picture Oscar. “The King’s Speech” took that trophy, along with prizes for its screenplay, by David Seidler; its director, Tom Hooper; and its lead actor, Colin Firth.

But Mr. Rudin also sidestepped a show that was working hard to stay afloat amid the debris of a season that inflicted some damage on almost everyone who took part. With 10 nominations, “True Grit” got no prizes. “The Social Network,” once considered a lock for best picture, won awards only for its script, its score and its editing; “Toy Story 3” won best animated movie, but there was the simultaneous suggestion that voters don’t take that art form seriously in the top race.

The Academy had to make do this year without an “Avatar,” the sort of late-season, prize-worthy crowd pleaser that automatically draws an audience to the show. Instead, it worked hard — you could almost hear the gears grinding through montages that made obligatory turns in all directions — to build its 10 best pictures into an engine strong enough to drive the show.

But the campaigners behind those films, and much of the audience, were already worn out by months of promotion as studios had kept “The King’s Speech,” “True Grit,” “The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” “127 Hours” and “The Social Network” in theaters, even while easing up on new releases. While most of those films piled up respectable ticket sales, the overall box office, starved for fresh fare, is down 21 percent so far this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to Hollywood.com’s box-office service.

What needed to be fixed, in Mr. Sherak’s eyes?

He said he would wait to discuss that with Academy governors in the weeks ahead. “Did allowing so much behind-the-scenes access take some of the mystique away?” he said of a tactic that was intended to bring the young audience aboard via Twitter, Facebook and an enormous array of backstage streaming video via Oscar.com. “Maybe some of that criticism is right, but all I know is that you can’t get everything right all the time.”

“You get criticized for trying something; you get criticized for not trying something,” said Mr. Sherak, whose show came in for some public denigration as well as a share of private grousing by those in the game. “The only absolute is that not trying makes you old and stodgy.”

Sunday night’s show was not overly long. At about 3 hours and 11 minutes, it appeared to be the shortest since 1986, the year “Out of Africa” won best picture. But there was a cost to the hurry-up approach. Those at the controls managed to destroy the big moment for a producer of “The King’s Speech,” Gareth Unwin, by loudly bringing up the orchestra before he had gotten out a word — as if a guy behind the year’s winning movie was just one more embarrassing Englishman to be hurried off the stage in the interests of good television.

“I want to be good television so badly, as you can see,” said Randy Newman, as he apologized on the air for having to say thank you to people who helped him win the Oscar for his musical work on “Toy Story 3.” (Backstage, Mr. Newman picked up on the weary, wrung-out mood when he responded to a chipper college reporter’s question about breaking into the music business by responding: “Who would want to break into it? It’s like a bank that’s already been robbed.”)

Tom Hanks, a member of the Academy’s governing board, inadvertently pointed to one of the season’s biggest problems — the fragmentation of honors, with no film reaching critical mass — early in the show. He opened with a spiel about a “trifecta” of cinematography, art direction and best picture awards having distinguished great films like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Titanic,” then presented the cinematography award to “Inception” and the art direction prize to “Alice in Wonderland,” neither of which had a prayer of becoming best picture.

The night’s young co-hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, were unlikely to get the career lift many predicted when they were unexpectedly appointed. Instead of showing how they were stars with enough wattage to carry moviedom’s biggest moment, the pairing emphasized their flaws as performers: a squinty-eyed, all-too-relaxed Mr. Franco came across as not taking his job that seriously, and the frequent industry argument that Ms. Hathaway lacks chemistry with her male co-stars was given a fresh example.

A series of elaborate gags and production numbers, more than a few playing off their status as greenhorns, turned the hosts into straight men for Billy Crystal — perhaps the last of the great Oscar hosts? — who showed up at midshow to a standing ovation and sopped up the applause.

“No, no, no, no, go ahead,” said Mr. Crystal, encouraging the crowd to love him a little more than they loved what they were getting this year.

But Mr. Franco and Ms. Hathaway survived. And for the Oscars, there’s always next year.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"