According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the world was expected to exhaust its reserves of Brokeback Mountain jokes in early February. Hollywood is a resourceful town, however, and within the first 90 seconds of the Oscar broadcast last night, it pulled another one from its stockpile, as Billy Crystal and Chris Rock popped their heads out from a tent to announce that they couldn’t make it to host tonight.
The larger joke was that, having run through every former and potential host, including Mr. Moviefone, the Oscars were finally forced to go with Daily Show host Jon Stewart. It seemed falsely humble: after all, if The Daily Show is the unofficial newscast-in-exile of disgruntled liberals, then Stewart and Hollywood should have gone together like popcorn and butter. Instead, the audience laughed politely at a monologue that was surprisingly ordinary and tame, with jokes about how skimpy the actresses’ gowns were, how many dates George Clooney goes on and how many actors were in Crash.
But Stewart hit his stride at the end of the monologue, with, of all things, a Brokeback bit: a montage of homoerotic moments in classic Westerns. ("Mind if I have a look at your Winchester?") It was not just a juvenile–and gaspingly funny–piece, it was also a send-up of an Oscar staple, the hortatory movie montage. Indeed, there were so many montages this year–noir films, epic, message movies, biopics–that Stewart joked, "I can’t wait until later, when we see Oscar’s salute to montages! Holy crap, we are out of film clips! We are literally out of film clips! If you have film clips, send them, please. We have another three hours. I don’t care if they’re on Beta, just send them."
Stewart, it turned out, was not a very good Oscar host. But he was a great anti-host. His best moments came not when he was playing the gladhanding Hollywood cheerleader–both he and the audience seemed uncomfortable with that–but when he played the role of the cynical uncle making the toast at the wedding.
All this played better at home than it seemed to in the hall. Whatever Hollywood’s political affinities with The Daily Show, there is a big divide between L.A. showbiz (earnest, effusive, credulous) and Stewart’s New York sensibility (ironic, deadpan, skeptical). He made fun of flighty celebrities’ causes: coming out of a break, he pretended to be in mid-speech, saying, "And that’s why I think Scientology is right, not just for this city, but for the country!" He made fun of the self-congratulatory montage of image movies: "And none of those issues were ever a problem again." And he made fun of the high-pressure Oscar campaigning, introducing compilations of negative ads, narrated by The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert, for the Best Actress and Sound Editing categories. (Charlize Theron, one said, was just "hagging it up again" in North Country, just like in Monster.)
The eternal problem with the Academy Awards on TV is that it’s impossible to figure out who they’re for–the stars, or us. On the one hand, they’re filled with insider jokes about movies the audience hasn’t seen and long lists of thank yous to people we’ve never heard of. (In a strange decision, the producers had the orchestra play as soon as winners took the stage, as if they were being played off before they opened their mouths.) On the other hand, they’re a clumsy advertisement to the masses–like those endless montages, the only message of which is: "Movies! Boy, there sure have been a lot of them!"
This year’s Oscars were no less weird or self-indulgent than usual. (There were also a few unpredictable moments, as when Three Six Mafia won Best Song for "It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp," from Hustle and Flow, and gave a boisterous thank-you speech that caused ABC to hit the dump button at least once.) But having Stewart hosting was like having a friend on our side, digging his hand into the bowl of chips on the coffee table while making smart-assed remarks.
We love the Oscars, of course, but we love to hate them too, and Jon Stewart as host gave us permission to do both. We needed him, for instance, after the musical production for Crash, which featured interpretive dancers in front of burning cars. "If you are trying to escape a burning car," he said, "my advice would be not to move in slow motion."
Pomposity, bizarre staging, self-importance — it was the sort of thing that would usually make you think: I can’t wait to see Jon Stewart make fun of this tomorrow. Tonight, thankfully, we didn’t have to wait.