Oscar host can't please 'em all, so why worry?

By BRIAN LOWRY

Stewart

Chris Rock's remarks at the Oscars drew comments from some miffed Bush supporters.

ALTHOUGH PREDICTIONS are best left to fortune-tellers and ESPN studio analysts, I'm going out on a limb to say that Jon Stewart will do a perfectly fine job hosting the Oscars, and that a small but vocal minority will be greatly offended.

Stewart will be amusing, because he's funny and talented, and TV critics will applaud him, because most of us heartless bastards love the guy. Hell, a critics' group gave "The Daily Show" an award as best news program, an honor that even embarrassed the host, since it's a fake news program.

Stewart will also tell a few jokes at the Bush administration's expense, which is a big part of what he regularly does on a much smaller stage. At that point, critics who dare praise him will receive angry emails from conservatives.

The nicer letters, as opposed to those scrawled in crayon, will go something like the one I received from a woman last year who complained of Chris Rock's opening banter, "I don't tune into the Oscars to see people ridicule my president."

Lady, let me save you some time: Surveying this year's nominees, if you refer to George W. Bush as "my president," you probably don't want to tune in anyway.

This reaction will then trigger a debate about Hollywood being out of touch and the Oscars becoming too political. If the ratings are disappointing, which given the indie-film nature of the nominees seems logical, pundits will leap to attribute sagging tune-in and the much-discussed box office decline to a disconnect between landlocked moviegoers and showbiz execs who can see the Pacific Ocean when the smog lifts.

If nothing else, it'll give Fox News' biggest blowhards and Matt Drudge something to fill time and space through early March.

THE TRUTH, OF COURSE, is less scandalous or sexy, as the truth often is. Voting Republican shouldn't disqualify anyone from watching the Academy Awards except for the most vehement ideologues who are perpetually outraged by the "Hollywood left." Besides, Scarlett Johansson in the red dress she wore to the Golden Globes tends to obliterate political (and based on women I've polled, perhaps even gender) boundaries.

Here are the facts: By any measure the Oscars remain a huge draw, the year's second-most-watched event behind the Super Bowl -- unless the "American Idol" finale eclipses it, which is possible. Yet audience fragmentation is inexorable, and the absence of crowd-pleasing fare like "The Lord of the Rings" from this year's nominees exacerbates the problem.

With so many award shows, the Oscars also don't resonate as strongly with younger audiences, fueling the war of attrition with which the Grammys and Emmys have also wrestled. Indeed, NBC's Olympics coverage is fighting a similar demographic battle by emphasizing junky new "Dude, pass the bong" sports introduced to the Games in the 1990s. (What are "moguls" and a "halfpipe," anyway? Do Sumner Redstone and Tommy Chong compete or something?)

Short of becoming the MTV Movie Awards or colluding to nominate blockbusters, all the Oscars can do to smooth away wrinkle lines is to keep tinkering with the presentation or experiment with the host, which is where recruiting Rock came in.

In Rock, the Academy executed a nifty sleight-of-hand trick, choosing a performer instantly dubbed controversial and dangerous -- as if this adept comic was going to suffer an outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome. Conservatives might have grumbled, but the only group with a justifiable grievance in hindsight was the Jude Law fan club.

STEWART EMBODIES considerably less of a risk perception-wise, and however many viewers he brings to the party promises to be offset by diminished rooting interest in the nominees. As evidence of the uphill battle, ratings within Rock's constituencies among young men and African-Americans did rise last year but overall audience erosion continued, albeit by a modest 5% to 41.5 million viewers.

Frankly, the likelihood of the "award show gods" smiling on the telecast, as producer Gil Cates puts it, would improve markedly if said gods threw another wildly commercial epic like "Titanic" into the mix. Barring such divine intervention, neither Hollywood nor its critics should be unduly preoccupied with the parasitic spin cycle that envelops major events and ascribes overblown (and usually self-serving) implications to them.

So what's the best strategy when you can't please some people any of the time? Just sit back, and enjoy the show.