Hollywood is apparently unhappy with Seth MacFarlane’s hosting of the Oscars on Sunday night. So says the New York Times:
Post-Oscar Monday found the movie capital coming to grips with a 3-hour-35- minute ceremony that climbed in the ratings but at its best seemed to hide a great year for film behind a flurry of musical numbers, TV memories and Michelle Obama. At its worst, members of the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said, the ceremony trafficked in offensive humor.
Let us pause for a moment to savor the idea of Hollywood’s elite objecting to “offensive humor”—these same people who have spent decades mocking good taste, decorum, and Christians; and taking pride in offending middle America while flaunting their politics to flyover country.
“I think I’m a very liberal guy, but I actually winced,” said Lawrence Turman, an Academy member who is chairman of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
The executive producer of Booty Call winced!
He echoed criticism that a number of people in Hollywood voiced privately, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid complicating relations with the Academy and the show’s producers.
Anonymous critics? Remember that the next time you hear some actor’s portrayal described as “brave.”
Mr. Turman, who described the producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, as longtime friends, referred specifically to a joke by Mr. MacFarlane about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Yeah, that was a stinger all right. Right up there with this movie, about the assassination of George W. Bush. What’s that you say? No one in Hollywood protested? It won the top award at the Toronto Film Festival? Oh.
Cathy Schulman, a producer who won a best picture Oscar in the past for “Crash” and is the president of the industry group Women in Film, took aim at a song-and-dance routine about female nudity in film. “Among the women I’ve talked to today I would say I haven’t heard from any who thought it was in good taste,” said Ms. Schulman. She expressed particular chagrin that the dance number poked fun at nudity, which is generally a difficult issue for actresses, in connection with performances that were often “wrenching and moving in many ways.”
So Schulman—whose Oscar-winning film co-stars Ludacris; caution: hyperlink NSFW—is pissed that MacFarlane made fun of actresses who pose nude on camera for enormous sums of money. But she’s okay with the nudity itself that many “rubes” happen to find offensive.
Such a lack of irony is as hilarious as it is, uh, revealing. (It’s also not new.)
What it reveals is that, in Hollywood, material is considered offensive only when it breaches political correctness. And what it explains is why Hollywood conservatives hide their views and meet in secret, like Christians in pre-Constantine Rome.
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