Seth MacFarlane has a great speaking voice and presence. He could have been a good host for the Oscars with this calling card. Unfortunately from beginning to end his off color jokes were too controversial to even call funny. Captain Kirk (William Shatner), shown in a screen insert at the beginning of the show, was prophetically right: Seth MacFarlane will go down as the worst host of the Oscars ever, even upstaging David Letterman who to his credit only had one long bad joke running throughout the show.
That pretty much covers it about Seth's racist and sexist hosting. The first question is why was he chosen and the other is shouldn't he have been better background checked? From the groans in the audience it was quite clear that many did not enjoy his puns. According to the Los Angeles Times, his worst jokes were unabashedly over the top, and those are the ones that have put him out of the running for an Oscar comeback.
The 6,000 members of the Academy represent 15 general areas – actors, animators and short film makers, art directors and costume designers, cinematographers, composers and songwriters, documentary filmmakers, directors, executives, film editors, makeup artists and hairstylists, producers, public relations specialists, sound artists and engineers, visual effects experts and writers.
It would be interesting to poll how many Academy members enjoyed MacFarlane who poked malicious fun at George Clooney, Rihanna, Jack Nicholson and Quvenzhané Wallis, Salma Hayek, and Jessica Alba. Most of the jokes reveal the hidden agendas of Seth MacFarlane and the way he tackled these subjects was not very conscious. The host attacked young women who show their breasts on film (often coerced when trying to break into the industry), and humored about domestic violence, closeted gays - perhaps himself, statutory rape, the dialects of foreign born nationals, drug and alcohol abuse, mental disorders, racial profiling, eating disorders, political executions, and anti-semitism.
Sigmund Freud wrote about the nature of humor and laughter. ‘Only joking’ is one of the most common phrases in language. Freud revealed that repression is behind humor in "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"(1905). MacFarlane's repressed unconscious seems to represent an interconnection of fears about ethnicity, gender, and illness.
Was the Academy fully conscious about this music tribute Oscars when hiring MacFarlane? He may be able to sing and dance, but should have acted more like last year's Oscar best actor Jean Dujardin in "The Actors"and been silent.
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