The Oscars

[ArmyOfPenguins]

Apologies if this has already been posted. The opening song is draw-droppingly disrespectful. I don't know what they were thinking.

www.buzzfeed.com/hillaryreinsberg/sexist-things-at-the-oscars

It was hostile to both the women who work in the industry and those who fund it by buying the fucking product. I think Vulture's take on why it's not just a joke is very good.

www.vulture.com/2013/02/why-seth-macfarlanes-misogyny-matters.html

Also this response in the NYT is pretty hot on the workplace front.

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/seth-macfarlane-and-the-oscars-hostile-ugly-sexist-night.html

For all that people are free to feel that it's 'just a joke', that doesn't actually offer you any protection from insidious sexism, you're still the target, whether you laugh or not. The only prerequisite is that you're female.

Didn't play the youtube thing as CSI on

Reading the comments though it seems that 2 of the times the song goes "we saw your boobs" was in rape scenes - is that right?

If he really had to do it couldn't he have chosen times women took their tops off in romantic/cheerful circumstances? To crow over seeing an actress with her top off in a rape scene seems horrible.

"To crow over seeing an actress with her top off in a rape scene seems horrible."

Which was one of the points of the song, although no-one seems to have actually watched it in context.

Captain Kirk has arrived from the future to tell Seth Macfarlane not to continue, because he has seen the outcome and tells Seth that "The show's a disaster. Your jokes are tasteless and inappropriate and everyone ends up hating you". Seth asks what he does wrong, and Kirk/Shatner plays Seth a clip from 'the future' where he sings this tasteless, inappropriate song about boobs that makes everyone hate him.

The actresses are obviously in on the bit. The writers and performers know how tasteless it is, that's why it's funny. It's contrasting the glitz and glamour of the Academy Awards with a childish song about boobs, plus acknowledging that doing something so ridiculously inappropriate makes everyone hate the host. Obviously they were dead on the money.

They could have done something else. Hating on women seems like business as usual for him, for Hollywood, for the entire freaking world. I think he just wanted to offend women/girls/non-white people and use "humour" as a disguise.

I didn't see Jodie Foster being "in on the joke" while they sang and danced cheerfully about "seeing her boobs" in a film about gang rape.

I mean really, way to much leeway being given there.

The actresses they cut to for the reaction shots, I mean.

the shots were probably more like shots from other award shows rather than pre-recorded. And yep the whole thing was drenched in irony - which pretty much was licence to sing the thing. The irony was just a permit, and a way of making anyone who objected look like humourless feminists.

Did any of you see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on the Golden Globes? This is almost a response to that. You had two highly successful women with popular tv shows that have obvious feminist themes (actually even use the F word) collaborating to be funny and not offensive.

So what can the Oscars do to retaliate? Show women as the pieces of meat they really are.

The pieces of meat that they WANT women to be reduced to, but we are obviously so much more than that.

Fuck this. Seriously.

Yep Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were effing BRILLIANT. lots of tweets about how they should present next year's Oscars.

Yes they were fun! I liked the Life of Pie joke. Mmm, pie.

Didn't watch and only heard about the song, which actually referenced 4 depictions of rape. Ghastly, but perhaps not surprising given the industry.

It was the Onion's tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis that made me then . I don't buy the crap about it not being intended for her 9 year old eyes, that the intention wasn't to offend or that because it was satire to highlight the sexism of Hollywood, so okay. This article explains exactly why the tweet and comments supporting the Onion were so contemptuous.

Via a different blog, this article defending the Onion tweet came up and my jaw dropped again. Dialogue in the comment section shows she just does NOT get why folks are unhappy about this. You can cut the white privilege with a knife.

Ha, make that "contemptible" above. (Fail due to boiling blood.)

Wow, so that blogger thinks the Onion was making a point about how women were spoken about in the media and how it was only shocking when applied to a child? I suspect the comment was more along the lines of either, "oh god why does everyone like her!?" or "huhuhu bet this'll get us attention!"

The Captain Kirk thing was a device to try to make the song ironic and self-referential. I thought it was pretty lame as an excuse to have the song. Seth McFarlane also made a very similar reference to Quvenzhane in a later song where he rhymed "Helen Hunt" with "adorable". It was after the Onion tweet, I mean WTF twice in half an hour!

actually I assume that's exactly what the onion, or whoever the idiot in charge if their twitter acct that thought they were doing. but the problem is a grownup should know that calling a 9 year old a cunt-no matter how tongue in cheek is vile. didn't know there was also a song implying it too

I just switched off, in the end. Who WAS he, anyway? Usually it's some big star or someone genuinely funny..... Bring back Billy Crystal. Even Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin were funny last year.

Bad taste, all of it.

Yeah you're right Florafox Bet he thought that was really clever. :(

I think that gag was referring to Anne Hathaway though?

that boob song? - just awful, really really awful.

I thought Hollywood was supposed to be very PC. How on earth did they think that was acceptable?