Oscars: Raising ratings & hackles

Jewish, women’s and family organisations publicly flung knives at Seth MacFarlane’s off-colour Oscar show. Hollywood, for the most part, stayed true to form and aimed its cutlery at his back.

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 humour.

“I think I’m a very liberal guy, but I actually winced,” said Lawrence Turman, an Academy member. He echoed criticism that a number of people in Hollywood voiced privately, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid complicating relations with the Academy and the show’s producers. Turman, who described the producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, as longtime friends, referred specifically to a joke by MacFarlane about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Cathy Schulman, a producer and 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,” Schulman said. 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.”

But the ratings were good, and almost nothing counts for more where the Oscar enterprise is concerned. The show drew an average audience of 40.3 million viewers, up about 3 per cent from last year.

Oscar shows tend to rise and fall in the ratings based on the proven box-office appeal of several best picture nominees; this was a good year. MacFarlane, who is known mostly as a TV producer but passed for a musical variety star as host of Sunday’s ceremony, will also be credited as a drawing power.

But the post-mortems here included unease over gay jokes that began with an appearance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, and frank dismay at some of the riskier humour, particularly bits that turned on gags about women and Jews.
“It is offensive, even though comedians have great latitude,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, speaking of a skit in which MacFarlane, in character as the trash-talking teddy bear from his movie Ted, counselled Mark Wahlberg that it’s best to become Jewish and donate to Israel if you want to work in Hollywood.

Hier, an Academy member, was seconding an opinion offered in a statement by Abraham H Foxman. Speaking by telephone, Foxman said he was particularly troubled by the “duration and intensity” of a skit that was likely, in his opinion, to be seen as reinforcing anti-Jewish stereotypes among Oscar viewers around the world. “It wasn’t funny,” Foxman said. “It was ugly.”

The Oscar ceremony was first broadcast overseas in 1969 and now reaches viewers in more than 200 countries. There are no firm numbers for the show’s international audience, but Zadan advised nominees this month, “You’ll be talking to over 1 billion people around the world.”

Others expressed unease over MacFarlane’s reliance on jokes about race and women, including the opening number about nudity called, We Saw Your Boobs.
Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, an organisation that recently released a report on the shortage of female movie directors, said, “The sexist tone throughout the show indicates a critical need for the Academy to expand its talent pool of female writers, producers and directors.”

Burton added that instead of celebrating film, “the whole world saw them honouring men and mocking women.”

The Parents Television Council, was also harshly critical. “The Academy Awards broadcast contained sexist, misogynistic and sexually exploitative content,” Tim Winter, the president, said in a statement. “Clearly, families are no longer a welcome part of the audience.”

An Academy spokeswoman defended MacFarlane and the show’s producers in a statement — “We think the show’s producers, and host, did a great job, and we hope our audience found it entertaining.”

As for the awards themselves, the evening brought a little something for most of the high-profile pictures and left virtually everyone feeling slighted in one way or another. Ben Affleck had the glory of sharing an Oscar as a producer of Argo, which won best picture, but hadn’t even been nominated as its director.

Steven Spielberg watched Daniel Day-Lewis pick up the award for his work in Lincoln, but Ang Lee only moments before had edged Spielberg aside, to win the directing Oscar for Life of Pi.

Despite MacFarlane’s determination to test the lines of taste, some influential people in Hollywood spoke out in support of the show.

“The acceptance speeches had a genuine feel to them, and I think that had a lot to do with the host and the tone he set,” said Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the backer of movies that won best foreign film (Amour) and best documentary (Searching for Sugar Man).

And while some older Academy members were cringing about MacFarlane’s tribute to Hollywood’s topless women — Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson, among others, were mentioned — some, at least among the younger crowd, were fine with it.

Every year, after the Oscars, the Academy studies the telecast in minute detail to decide what worked and what did not, meaning that the rumbling and grumbling over the 85th installment is unlikely to end anytime soon.