There's only one logical candidate to host the Oscars next year

It's always amusing to watch older people (and yes, I am one) try to figure out what "the kids" would like to see, because it's always so tragically, desperately wrong. I'll give the folks who put together the Academy Awards credit for trying to shake things up a bit, but if you're going to bring in the kids, a self-important, pretentious quasi-intellectual indie guy and a Liza Minelli-lookalike who did a couple of princess movies and seems to also be a big presence on the indie circuit is hardly the way to go.

Last night's broadcast, described today by Randi Rhodes as "the worst television viewing of our lifetime" started out promisingly, with James Franco and Anne Hathaway in an Inception dream sequence. But it went rapidly downhill from there, and as soon as it devolved into Hathaway bickering with her mom on worldwide television and Franco making sure everyone know he's still young enough to have a grandma, I knew that I was going to watch the American Masters documentary on Ahmet Ertegun that was being broadcast on Channel 31 instead. Because the only thing I really wanted to see from last night's broadcast was this:

Because I doubt there breathes a woman in this country over the age of thirty-five who hasn't been madly in love with Colin Firth ever since this:

So I wanted to hear what The Man Who Will Always Be Darcy had to say, and as one could have predicted if one had watched any of his interviews this season, he knocked it out of the park.

I dare say that Colin Firth could do a quite lovely job hosting the Academy Awards, with a light froth of self-deprecating charm mingled with the self-important ponderousness that this annual festival of industry self-congratulation requires. And after watching Joel McHale's obsessive tubthumping the night before at the normally very funny Spirit Awards about what he referred to as "having lunch down at the Y" and missing John Waters, who used to host the Spirit Awards, terribly, the show could do worse. But what a step down that would be for the Divine Mr. Firth, who having finally received the brass ring he's deserved for so long, should finally become a household name outside of those households occupied by sighing middle-aged women.

But that's not who I'm thinking should host this show. I'm not thinking in terms of George Clooney either, for while I like him as an actor, and respect his good works, his dimply adorableness would probably wear thin after three hours.

It seems to me that what the show needs is someone who can pull off the infusion of snark that this annual spectacle of self-importance so desperately needs, while doing it so quickly and so deftly that the bejeweled and botoxed divas and identically-tuxed men won't even know what hit them. It needs a man whose television work every week never fails to make me say, wonderingly, "HOW THE HELL DOES HE GET AWAY WITH THAT IN PRIME TIME???"

I speak, of course, of this man:

Listen to Seth MacFarlane's rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" and think of what he could do with the kind of cheesy musical number that usually opens the show:

He's already hosted the Writer's Guild Awards:

And while he doesn't wear a suite QUITE as nicely as Colin Firth, he wears it quite well.

So, if you're with me in believing that only Seth MacFarlane can save the Motion Picture Academy from dishing up three hours of this kind of crap next year, go tell them so.

I realize it's Seth MacFarlane's world and we just live in it, but come on...

You'd think that with all the problems there are in this country right now, we could grow the fuck up already.

But you'd be wrong:

A story headlined "Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters" was the most popular story on Reuters.com this year, Reuters insiders Ernest Scheyder and Ken Li say on Twitter.

How punny.
My colleague Jay Yarow puts it this way: "Whoever spent tireless hours working on some investigative report for Reuters is silently weeping right now."

Some things are inevitable

Sometimes it seems that America's national pastime is mocking show tunes. Everyone loves to mock the idea of people on a stage bursting into song for no reason at all. Of course what we think of as "show tunes" today are, at their best, the successors of Tin Pan Alley songs with names like "The Little Good for Nothing's Good for Something After All", and the mythical song that the New Lost City Ramblers once threatened to sing, "I'm So Miserable Without You (It's Almost Like Having You Here". But scratch the surface of any of the pop songs that lodge in your head for days, and you'll find the influence of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. No more unlikely a candidate for such influence is Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who freely admits to hearing, and singing, a lot of show tunes as a kid. Armstrong isn't exactly possessed of the greatest voice in the world, and wasn't even at 15, when he sang in a Christmas show:

But how many people would ever dream that someone who rose to fame singing about getting high and masturbation would have even been caught dead doing such a thing? When "American Idiot" came to Broadway, it seemed shocking, unless you knew about who Armstrong's influences were.

An even less likely aficionado of show tunes is snarky Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the most twisted animated show in the history of television, Family Guy. It hardly seems likely that the same mind that created the initially homicidal but now only cynical baby Stewie, the idiotic, repulsive, id-driven Peter Griffin, a dog that's the only intelligent creature in the house, and the date-rapist Glenn Quagmire, apparently saw all that as a stepping stone to his real love -- the American songbook:

Seth MacFarlane, below, the pop-cultural polymath who created and provides many of the voices on the Fox animated comedy “Family Guy,” will be lending his pipes to an album of 1940s and ’50s-era show tunes for Universal Republic Records, the label said on Friday. The album, which will be produced and arranged by Joel McNeely (whose credits include Mr. MacFarlane’s series “American Dad”) will include standards by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe, as well as a song called “She’s Wonderful, Too” that Mr. McNeely wrote for the television show “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” Universal Republic said in a news release that Mr. MacFarlane would sing to the accompaniment of a live orchestra and a big band, using vintage equipment and analog tape to replicate the sound of classic records by artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney.

It seems ridiculous, sort of like an album of Pee Wee Herman singing selected numbers from Der Rosenkavalier -- unless you've ever heard MacFarlane actually sing.

Here's MacFarlane as both Brian the dog and Stewie at the 2007 Emmy Awards. The song is an adaptation of the hilarious "The Freakin' FCC", by the incomparable Walter Murphy:

...and MacFarlane as "Peter Griffin" with "Lois" voice actor Alex Borstein on Jimmy Kimmel in another Murphy masterpiece:

So these are all songs in the Family Guy vein. But if you are still thinking that this is just a vanity project by someone with enough money to buy himself a record contract, take a gander at MacFarlane singing "I Like Myself" from MGM's It's Always Fair Weather" (music by André Previn, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green):

...or "You're Sensational" from High Society:

If you, like me, watch Family Guy for the music (and I'm sure there are one or two of you out there who do), you know that this project was out there waiting for someone to do it. Because some guys, like the reluctant bridegroom in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, would rather....just....sing!

Heh. Imagine what Sarah Palin would do with this one

Now that Seth McFarlane is making a side career out of baiting Sarah Palin, let's see what she (or any other Jeebofascist politician) has to say about this: