by ALISON LEVIER Section Editor
Hollywood was abuzz Sunday, February 24 when the Academy held their 85th annual award show, also known as the Oscars.
Writer/comedian/actor Seth MacFarlane hosted and, although he is receiving a whole lot of scrutiny for his “sexist” and “racist” comments, he actually did a great job hosting. He was entertaining, funny, just crude enough, and kept the night very interesting and fun to watch.
MacFarlane started off the night with a few songs, with one song in particular sparking mass amounts of criticism labeling MacFarlane as a “sexist”. The song was about stars who have shown their breasts in movies, and many female stars were horrified at this display.
Jane Fonda wrote on a blogpost written about how offended she was by the song: “[R]emember that this is a telecast seen around the world watched by families with their children and to many this is neither appropriate or funny.”
Regardless of all the hate directed toward the night’s host, the show went on, and I was honestly entertained. Of course, award shows do tend to get boring, as all it really is is rich and famous people giving trophies to other rich and famous people. Gets kind of repetitive.
Probably the best moment of the night was when they decided to do a movie-musical tribute with stars from the movies “Chicago”, “Dream Girls”, and “Les Misérables”.
Catherine Zeta-Jones was an honest disappointment, lip-synching her way through the hit “All That Jazz”. More like “All That Laziness“. She did not look like she wanted to be there, and it really did not appear that she knew all the words to the song she was supposed to be singing live. That type of trash would not fly on Broadway. Ah, Hollywood.
After Zeta-Jones bored the audience half to sleep, Jennifer Hudson got out there and nailed her performance of “And I Am Telling You” from “Dream Girls”. It was absolutely perfect. She got a standing ovation from the entire crowd.
Up next was the cast of “Les Mis” singing a medley of some of the highlights from the movie, and it was magical. It seriously looked and sounded like it was an anniversary concert filled with great stars. As a theatre nerd, this whole sequence of performances was really inspiring and just awesome to see.
“The Les Mis performance was so perfect. Topped the whole night for me,” says junior Gabrielle Tumminia.
Anne Hathaway, star of “Les Mis”, won Best Supporting Actress, Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for his work in “Django Unchained,” and even Adele won an Oscar for her song “Skyfall”.
Jennifer Lawrence was then awarded Best Actress and, upon going up to accept her award, fell up the stairs. This was one of the highlights of the night, but it was not as good as Hugh Jackman rushing to help the fallen star.
Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for his work in “Lincoln”, (shocker) and Best Movie was presented to “Argo”, directed by Ben Affleck.
The show closed with a musical tribute to the losers of the night, and all in all it was a great awards show.
Even though he says he will never do it again, I would personally love to see MacFarlane back hosting the Academy Awards in the future.