Good Lord but Seth MacFarlane is a hack in extremis

punching ineffectually waaa-ay above his weight on the Oscars Telecast last night. I'd a paid Sally Field $10,000.00 of my hard earned money to beat on Seth's no talent ass with a baseball bat like a pinata during a "Flying Nun" sketch early in the broadcast. Ah but nothing quite saves the Oscars from irrelevancy and derision quite like a Nazi Gag derived from "The Sound of Music", a Broadway Musical that is fifty years old....sheer comic genius at work. For that fact I'd a paid Bruce Vilanch $15,000 to waddle out on stage and quietly hand MacFarlane a pink slip and a cab voacher.

Hope everyone got a good night's rest last night....

Because after last night's Waterloo-esque debacle on the Oscar's telecast, now today begins the long twilight struggle to repair William Shatner's Reputation. I suggest an evening of readings from Shakespeare at the A.R.T. with some suitable patter to bridge the varied soliloquys. I'd pay a hundred bucks to hear William Shatner read "Now is the winter of our discontent" at the A.R.T. Proposed titles "Bill & Will, A Love Story"? "Shat-n-Shake"? The mind reels with the possibilities!

Congrats to Hometown Hero Ben Affleck

his latest picture "Argo" won the Oscar last night. That boyo has completed his resurrection from the ashes of "Gigli", "Daredevil", "Pearl Harbor" etc etc. Now he is gonna hafata work 24-7 to mess it all up again and crash back onto skid row...I suggest he start with some parenting advise from Alicia Silverstone or a lecture on exobiology from John Travolta.

Seth "The Family Guy" MacFarlane...is Hosting the Oscars tomorrow night?

My Ghod but Hollywood is desperate for attention isn't it? And doubling down on that whole "we need younger hipper viewers" meme that lead tinseltown to it's Waterloo in 2011 with James "The Sedated Zombie" Franco and Anne "The Zombie's Waitress" Hathaway as the event's co-hosts. Well these "tentpole television events", the Oscars, the Miss America Contest, The MD Labor Day Telethon, institutions that might've predated broadcast television but certainly reached "operational maturity" under the aegis of TV...all have aging audiences, the networks themselves rapidly becoming antiques. A process like that is historic in scope getting some mediocre cartoonist to host The Oscars can't stop it in any manner shape or form. Yup and when Hollywood is Desperate for Attention (over and above the norm) they make all sorts of bizarre entertaining mistakes...

Channel Zero Returns, Friday March 8th at 8pm Sharp!

With a screening of.... Jim Finn's "The Juche Idea" (2008)  an uproarious and provocative mockumentary deconstruction of North Korean propaganda and philosophy. Mixing together eye-popping archival footage with deadpan re-enactments, Finn has created a complex docu-fiction that is equally thought-provoking and entertaining. Translated as self-reliance, Juche (CHOO-chay) is a hybrid of Confucian and Stalinist thought that Kim Jong-il applied to the entire culture. In "The Juche Idea", a sympathetic South Korean filmmaker visits a North Korean artists' colony to bring Juche ideas into the 21st century. She ends up producing hilariously stilted shorts, including a nonsensical sci-fi story and the enigmatic "Dentures of Imperialism." "The Juche Idea" is both sardonic satire and historical excavation, an exuberant collage that reveals the absurdity at the heart of Kim-Jong-il's regime. Friday March 8th at 8pm (Sharp!) The Somerville Theatre, Micro-Cinema 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma 617 625 5700 Admission $7.50 In Korean and Bulgarian Subtitled in English

Channel Zero Now in our Seventeenth Year of Genteel Cinematic Transcendence!