Okay, so Sacha Cohen and Ben Stiller’s vetoed Avatar sketch at the Oscars might not have been that funny, but keep in mind, it’s either that or Hugh Jackman tap dancing.  Anyway, whaddya know, someone talked to James Cameron, the guy they were worried would storm out of the room, and he said the sketch would’ve been fine by him:

If they want to poke fun at Avatar Sunday, that’s OK by me,” said Cameron, “I’m sure we’ll laugh.”
As far as he’s concerned, he told me, jokes are just another element of Hollywood’s big night. And he’s fine with it.
“The Oscars are a celebration of movies…even the gaffes and out-of-bounds stuff are all part of the fun.” [E Online]

Shocking.  When one of the guys producing the Oscar telecast is a guy who’s frequently moved to tears by performances on So You Think You Can Dance, the producers may not be the best judges of what’s going to hurt people’s feelings.  The guy would probably slit his wrists over a mismatched duvet.

A soldier from the squad in which Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal was embedded announced today that he’s suing the filmmakers, because he says the main character is based on him.

Master Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver believes screenwriter Mark Boal based “virtually all of the situations” in the film on events involving him and claims he coined the phrase “the hurt locker,” according to a statement from lawyer.  Boal was a journalist in Iraq embedded with a squad that dismantled bombs, and he wrote a story about them for Playboy magazine. He developed his story into a screenplay about the soldiers and focused on one in particular, Will James. From that screenplay came the movie. Sarver claims Boal was embedded with Sarver’s unit and that he is James. Sarver says James’ nickname in the movie, “Blaster One,” was Sarver’s “call signal” while in Iraq. [ABC]

The suit is interesting as it seems specifically timed to coincide with the Oscars.  And also because you don’t need someone’s permission to write a movie about his life (at least, you can easily cloak it in a thin sheen of fiction, a la Citizen Kane, Last Days, etc.), and Hurt Locker never claimed to be anything other than fiction ^(footnote).  Meanwhile, remember the producer who wrote that letter I said wasn’t a big deal?  The Academy announced that he can’t come to the ceremony as punishment.  And I’m not the only one who smells an ulterior motive in everyone making a big deal out of this:
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According to Oscar telecast co-producer Adam Shankman, Sacha Baron Cohen was the first choice to host, but was vetoed by the Academy.  Now it seems he won’t even be a presenter, because someone didn’t like his planned Avatar skit.

[from Vulture's Exclusive] An insider familiar with the Oscar telecast tells Vulture that an Avatar sketch planned by Baron Cohen and Ben Stiller was nixed yesterday by show producer Bill Mechanic, who worried that Cameron would be so offended by it that he might even walk out of the Oscar broadcast on live TV. [*dismissive wank*]

Our insider informs us that Baron Cohen planned to appear onstage as a blue-skinned, female Na’vi, with Stiller translating “her” interplanetary speech. As the skit went on, though, it would become clear that Stiller wasn’t translating properly, because Cohen would grow ever more upset. At its climax, an infuriated Baron Cohen would pull open “her” evening gown to reveal that s/he was pregnant, knocked up with Cameron’s love child, and would go on to confront her baby daddy as if s/he were on Jerry Springer.

Mechanic, now both a producer of motion pictures and of this year’s Oscar telecast, was head of Twentieth Century Fox when Cameron’s Titanic famously went massively over budget and over schedule, so he’s well acquainted with Cameron’s sense of humor — or lack of it. “Let’s just say that Cameron isn’t known to be, shall we say, ‘self-deprecating,’” explained one insider familiar with the decision to cut the sketch.

Most people will pin this on Cameron, and that’d be a much easier joke for me, but the truth is, this is Hollywood pussyism at its finest.  For every one time a star takes offense to having his balls busted, an assistant or publicist intercepts and gets offended on his behalf at least 1000 times.  Everyone’s so afraid of offending each other, and everything seems offensive compared to their standard line of embarrassing ass kissing.  Hollywood needs to man up and be more like real people, like me and my friend Bill.  When we see each other, I tell him, “WHAT’S UP, FAGGOT CLIT?” and punch him in the nuts.  Then he pulls a knife and stabs me in the belly.  That’s how you know we’re good friends.

The Oscars hosts have been officially announced, and it will be Steve Martin, hosting his third Oscars, paired with Alec Baldwin in his first.  It seems like an okay, if boring choice.  Until you read this:

The pairing of Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Martin comes with a self-referential twist: The two are cast as rivals for the affection of a character played by Meryl Streep in a romantic comedy, “It’s Complicated,” which is directed by Nancy Meyers and is set for release by Universal Pictures on Christmas Day. [NYTimes]

Oof.  I hope we aren’t choosing hosts by who has a movie to promote now.  But I’ll save the conspiracy theories for when we talk about how the CIA wanted to assassinate Kennedy with an AIDS monkey.  Truth is, these hosts are sorta meh, just like the Oscars itself is sorta meh.  I was excited back when Dave Letterman was set to host, just like I was excited when Chris Rock and Jon Stewart were set to host.  But what happened?  Not a lot.  It’s an impossible gig because you’re trying to make jokes about people on the night when they’re taking something that’s supposed to be fun super seriously.  The closest they ever got to spontaneity was when Chris Rock made a Jude Law joke and Sean Penn ran onstage to complain that he didn’t get to be on the committee that decided whether it was okay to tell a joke or not.  Bottom line, short of getting Tracy Morgan to host and letting him ad-lib stories from his childhood to introduce categories (seriously, make this phone call now), nothing all that interesting is going to happen.

According to Nikki Finke, who as far as I can tell is the only source for this, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. were approached by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences about hosting this year’s Oscars as a duo, but turned them down.  Pretty disappointing, especially if RDJ was considering doing the whole show in blackface, as Billy Crystal used to do.  But you can hardly blame them for not wanting to take orders from this guy:

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