The Academy is supposedly a trade group, and yet it devoted its opening number to degrading a good part of its membership. And who knows what the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus thought that it was doing by serving as MacFarlane’s backup singers, but it’s hard not to wonder what the rhetorical point was meant to be. We saw your boobs, but that’s not even what we find attractive, so you exerted no power in doing so—all you did was humiliate yourself? Maybe that’s reading too much into it. It could be that MacFarlane just thought it would be funny for him to say the word gay as often as possible.
» Seth MacFarlane and the Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night, Close Read, The New Yorker.
Seth MacFarlance était l’hôte des Oscars 2013 et comme je le disais hier, voir des pédés utilisés sur scène pour essayer de nous faire croire que les blagues n’étaient pas sexistes, ça m’a beaucoup gêné aussi. Et le principal problème de ces blagues, c’était bien sûr qu’elles n’étaient pas drôles du tout.
Now, Seth MacFarlane is thirty-nine, and I am—barely—a part of the generation that he’s supposed to be appealing to. But I felt nostalgic last night for the Academy Awards of yore, when I sat on a couch with friends and watched everyone be glamorous and semi-respectable and we got to be gross and snarky. MacFarlane broke through that boundary last night, and suddenly the bitter asshole on the couch was up there on the stage, lost somewhere between a big smile and a sneer.
» Seth MacFarlane, Creepy Imitator, Culture Desk, The New Yorker.