When Anne Hathaway and James Franco went into Alec Baldwin’s dream, they also went into my nightmare.
For all of those living under a rock this year, Anne Hathaway and James Franco were the hosts of the 2011 Oscars. The show included a very mild amount of humor, forced jokes, and a good amount of awkwardness.
There were several things I was not too pleased with during the Oscars.
1. When the Oscars started, Franco and Hathaway went into Alec Baldwin’s dreams to try and learn the secret of being successful Oscar hosts. The first thought that crossed my mind was that this has already been done before in every other opening of an awards show.
Not surprisingly, the dreams included scenes with 2011 Oscar nominees. It was based on the movie “Inception,” with Leonardo DiCaprio helping Franco and Hathaway through the dreams.
Morgan Freeman’s narration of Baldwin’s dreams was slightly humorous however. I guess if you had to have someone to narrate your dreams, it might as well be Morgan Freeman. Another cute moment was when Hathaway announced in “The King’s Speech” that she had “good news from the future: microphones get smaller.”
Even so, most of it had been done before and made the opening just mediocre. The idea of traveling through clips of movies over the past year has gotten old. We’ve already seen most of these movies, and the movies we didn’t see we probably didn’t want to see.
2. After the big opening, some of the awkward moments and the forced jokes started to kick in. Hathaway and Franco’s dialogue was just not funny and especially wasn’t as comical as in the past.
Franco seemed very uncomfortable, and Hathaway tried making up for that by forcing more jokes than were necessary, which led to her standing there giggling while everyone else shifted uncomfortably in their seats. One forced laugh of the night was when Franco put on a dress. It says something about the quality of the show when only a guy in a dress will make the audience laugh.
3. The absolute worst thing was the dullness between the opening and the Best Picture award. The awards went 45 minutes past their scheduled time. Even for awards shows, that is considered long.
The delay was due to the long and drawn out acceptance speeches and all of the commercials. If the show was three hours long, at least an hour of it was commercials. They would give out one award, the recipient would give a five minute speech, and then it would be another 10 minutes of long and boring commercials.
However, there were a few things that made me restrain myself from reaching for the remote and changing the channel:
- I found Anne Hathaway’s rendition of “On My Own” kind of funny, and a nice break in between some of the more boring awards that were being given out. It was also a nice surprise that she could actually sing, compared to past award show hosts that just sing to get a good laugh out of the crowd.
- Billy Crystal also did a good job, bringing some comic relief and showing that sometimes younger Oscar hosts aren’t always better.
For me and many other critics, there were a lot more bad moments from the 2011 Oscar then there were good. For next year, they have a lot of work ahead of them to make the Oscars a better show overall and win back some of the viewers that they lost this year.
A few suggestions would be to get someone that has hosted the Oscars before, and was well-liked. Also, one host is usually better than two. One host can deliver all the jokes by themselves, and a person that is strong enough to host a major awards show by themselves definitely deserves to host.
Another thing that I would change is cutting the show down. Do whatever it takes to make the time in between the opening and the Best Picture award shorter. The shorter, the better. If they have to start the music faster during someone’s acceptance speech, then so be it. If we have to miss Melissa Leo drop the F-bomb then so be it.