14 DAY TRIAL // Somewhere, Ricky Gervais is laughing out loud with a huge “I told you so” expression on his face: James Franco thought Gervais bombed as host of the Golden Globes 2011 and that he’d make a better host, but the Oscars 2011 were the most boring, obnoxious and unfunny show in history, critics say.
For the first time in 83 years, the Oscars were hosted by full-time actors, a man and a woman, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, in a bid to draw in the younger segment of the audience.
Actually, the intent of this year’s Academy Awards was to make a show both classy and cool by blending the old with the new in a funny, entertaining manner.
Sadly, it was neither cool nor entertaining, voices online are saying and hosts Hathaway and Franco are mostly to blame.
Due credit should be given to Anne, a very talented actress who can act and sing and dance and who really tried her best to make the ceremony get off the ground.
Franco, on the other hand, regardless of his many (hidden or not) talents, was either too stoned to pay attention or he simply didn’t care, having realized how horrendous his lines were and wishing only for this to be over, The Hollywood Reporter says.
They had no chemistry going on, and the jokes they had written for them were lame and dated. The result was a 3.30-hour show that seemed to last an eternity – save for the moments when the winners received due recognition.
“In what could go down as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history, a bad and risky idea – letting two actors host – proved out in spectacularly unwatchable fashion on the biggest of all nights for the film world,” THR says, adding that the Oscars were “spectacularly bad.”
For whatever reason, Anne and James were simply not entertaining enough and this, together with other things, contributed to the worst edition in Oscar history.
“Franco looked like he was too cool to be there half of the time and like the lights were too bright for him the other half, forcing a squint that made his tight-lipped smile look more like disdain. Hathaway tried to help, but the duo didn't have even an ounce of the chemistry that Baldwin and Steve Martin had last year,” THR says.
Esteemed film critic Roger Ebert agrees: all those who won deserved to win, but the show was “dead. in. the. water,” yet another glitzy ceremony for which Hollywood builds up lots of hype and then doesn’t deliver.
“Despite the many worthy nominated films, the Oscarcast was painfully dull, slow, witless, and hosted by the ill-matched James Franco and Anne Hathaway. She might have made a delightful foil for another partner, but Franco had a deer-in-the-headlights manner and read his lines robotically,” Ebert writes.
Gawker is of the same opinion: the Oscars were bad but what was even worse was that the Oscars were bad while pretending to be good.
In previous years, the same awards ceremony was perhaps just as boring, but at least back then it was exclusive and did not pretend to be “hip” and “cool” as it did in 2011, last night.
Hollywood can have its moment of self-congratulation but perhaps the Academy should not forget that, besides being a film awards ceremony, the Oscars is also a TV show – a live broadcast, Gawker points out.
And no one in their right mind will ever watch a similar show next year if a change isn’t made to make it more entertaining, at least half as fun as promised.