Anne and James' Excellent Adventure

Sure, the title of the post is a stoner joke, but let's be honest, there was only one host on drugs last night.

How else to explain that?

In all seriousness, it is a bit irritating in retrospect to analyze the performances of our two young hosts simply because they were two people performing at completely different shows. Anne Hathaway was young, fun, energetic, good with ad-libs, and seemed genuinely happy to be there. James Franco...not so much.

The show itself ran pretty close to on-time, only going a few minutes over. And the whole thing felt briskly paced, with plenty of fun throwbacks to honor the history of film. The opening sequence was a great homage to all the best picture nominees--much better than the final rundown of the nominees, which was scored to the final scene from The King's Speech. It made the win feel preordained, which really killed the sense of drama.

In fact, that can be said of the entire show--started out ridiculously strong, but all the drama got sapped out of it the longer it went on. Not only that, but some of the fun started to drain, too--somewhere around the shorts categories, as always. The "time capsule" film clips were interesting, but hit-and-miss.

There's not a whole lot to be said of the show that hasn't been said elsewhere. I really enjoyed it, unlike most others, but most of the criticisms I'm hearing are things that I didn't mind (not enough jokes? of course, they're not comedians; not enough musical numbers? not a requisite, and I liked the restylized "On My Own" just fine) or I just didn't notice (sure, there was some awkwardness, but did I just miss all these long silences?). All in all, if they had Anne Hathaway back as host next year, I would be absolutely thrilled. A for Anne, C+ for James Franco, and a B+ for the ceremony on the whole.