MacFarlane on the Oscars last night.

Maybe it's because he called Ted "creative, adorable, ingenious and devilishly, thigh-slappingly hilarious," but our own Rex Reed made one for the history books last night by getting his own joke during the Oscar telecast. Host Seth MacFarlane, referencing Mr. Reed's recent controversial review of Melissa McCarthy Identity Thief, told the audiences that "Rex Reed will be out here to review Adele’s performance of 'Skyfall.'"

This line got a huge reaction on Twitter, as it was meant to. But the smartest insight into the joke's not-so-insidiously-clever bait and switch came from Venture Brothers and Henry Fool actor James Urbaniak:

On the other hand, has a critic ever gotten a shout-out from the Academy Awards before?

It goes without saying, Adele put on an incredible performance.

The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

West Side Story won Best Picture. Remember??

When putting down money for your Oscar predictions, it's always good to look at the past history of winners to see how the vote-makers will lean. Luckily, Nelson Carvajal has made a supercut of 84 years of Best Picture Winners. From Wings to On the Waterfront to The English Patient all the way up to last year's winner, The Artist, see how many of these brilliant films you can name.

Christoph Waltz on Between Two Ferns

"You should be off pudding, because you're fat." #InstantGold

Lincoln leads the pack for the Oscars with 12 nominations

There are a lot firsts in the nominations for the 85th annual Academy Award nominations. They include the youngest AND oldest Best Actress nominees (Emmanuelle Riva, 85, and Quvenzhané Wallis, 9), no trace of former dream team member Ben Affleck, and the first snub for Kathryn Bigelow.

On the other hand, there is no way Anne Hathaway is NOT singing this year, so get ready for some Franco-style flashbacks. And with 12 nominations for Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis will (unsurprisingly) definitely be going home with something gold this year.

A partial list below:

BEST PICTURE

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Lincoln
Les Misérables
Life of Pi
Amour
Django Unchained
Argo

DIRECTOR

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Michael Haneke, Amour
Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

ACTRESS

Naomi Watts, The Impossible
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

ACTOR

Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln
Denzel Washington, Flight
Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Amy Adams, The Master

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook
Alan Arkin, Argo
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Flight
Zero Dark Thirty
Django
Amour
Moonrise Kingdom

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Argo
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Amour (Austria)
No (Chile)
Rebelle (War Witch) (Netherlands)
A Royal Affair (Denmark)
Kon-Tiki (Norway)

ANIMATED FEATURE

Frankenweenie
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Wreck It Ralph
ParaNorman
Brave

ORIGINAL SONG

"Before My Time" - Chasing Ice
"Pi's Lullabye" - Life of Pi
"Suddenly" - Les Misérables
"Everybody Needs a Best Friend" - Ted
"Skyfall" - Skyfall

Plummer with his contemporary.

As we were otherwise unoccupied on Sunday night, we turned on the television to watch the 84th Academy Awards. “You’re only two years older than me,” Christopher Plummer crooned to his newly acquired gold statue, “Where have you been all my life?” Mr. Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Beginners, giving him the distinction of being the oldest actor to ever win an Oscar. But by the end of the telecast, we’d all aged at least a couple of decades, as did Billy Crystal, who seemed to have peeked inside the Ark of the Covenant right before the broadcast.

The whole night was full of non-surprises. Meryl Streep won. The Artist won. And while Martin Scorsese didn’t exactly win for Hugo, the sound editing was really, really good! Robert Downey, Jr. pretended he was making a documentary about himself, which would have been more amusing had he actually been making a documentary about himself, and Angelina Jolie’s right leg made a special cameo, as did Jennifer Lopez’s nipple, if the Internet is to be believed. (And when is it not?) Before the end of the telecast, Ms. Jolie’s leg had its own Twitter feed. Sample tweets: “Look at me!” “I’m over here!!!!” “Look at meeee!!” If nothing else, it beautifully captures that very special strain of Hollywood narcissism, which can only be described as “MEEEEEE!!!!!!”

Octavia Davis, who may have been the only person involved immune to the dreaded MEEEEEE virus, gave the night’s most moving speech and looked radiant in Tadashi Shoji, while Ms. Streep effectively summarized the entire evening in her speech with, “But … whatever.” Woody Allen won for the first time since Hannah and Her Sisters, and didn’t show up, as always. We were expected to be impressed when Cirque du Soleil did a short “History in Cinema” aerobatic routine, but were dampened by the sight of Mr. Clooney rolling his eyes in the front row. To get his attention these days you can’t be a French-Canadian acrobat or an Italian model. He’s moved on to American wrestlers, which seems like a natural evolutionary sequence of sorts; we’re just not sure in which direction.

And as Mr. Crystal attempted to joke, “nothing can take the sting out of economic problems like watching millionaires collecting gold statues.” And nothing can take the entertainment out of the entertainment industry like doing the same.

Sadly, no. Indeed, nothing about Sunday night’s perfunctory display of statue-bestowing carried the faintest whiff of daring or surprise, let alone wit or aesthetic ambition. At a seeming loss to explain why viewers should take an interest, producers of the show were reduced to airing infomercial-style testimonials to the idea of movie-watching, wherein Tom Cruise announced the terrifying news that the film industry had awakened his young imagination, and some star or another cited the transcendent message of The Outlaw Josie Wales. And since labored French pantomime seemed to be the evening’s winning ticket, Team Oscar also trotted out some members of Cirque du Soleil, who delivered their own interpretation of the charms of moviegoing, which seemed mainly to involve a lot of frenzied bolting out of your seat and into the air, apparently to secure the quickest possible exit. It was arguably the evening’s most stirring moment.

Played out as they were, Sunday's Oscar proceedings supply a curious parallel to this week's big-ticket media event in the political world—the next installment in the far more cash-intensive and self-important spectacle of the GOP primary season. Voters in Michigan and Arizona will cast ballots Tuesday in the grinding two-way race between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (inconveniently just as the print version of this column goes to bed). And much as the Oscar broadcast homed in on the formal, therapeutic virtues of movie-watching over and above any compelling screen characters, conflicts, or plotlines, so has this political melodrama—fed by unprecedented heaps of Super PAC cash and ferociously negative ad buys—failed to deliver a storyline that justifies all the self-promotional din.

Certainly the conventional horse-race reportage provides scant narrative interest. At press time, Mr. Romney seemed poised to eke out a victory in Michigan after trailing Santorum in the polls for the past several weeks. But a too-close Romney win wouldn’t seem likely to deliver the plodding frontrunner the turnaround his campaign so desperately craves—Michigan, after all, was supposed to be something of a sure thing for Team Mitt, since his father had been governor of the state, and since Romney fils had locked it down with comparative ease in the 2008 cycle. What’s more, the most recent polling in the next major battleground state of Ohio has Mr. Santorum still enjoying a comfortable 7-point lead. With apologies to hardcore mavens of popcult themes in the nation’s politics, such as Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich, one might even assign signature best-picture mascots to each campaign: Santorum’s mad dash to shore up his limited base-appeal amid the big-money ad buys of Team Romney calls to mind the machinations of small-market baseball general manager Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball (minus, of course, the plot point of Bean’s divorce); while Romney’s campaign of frenzied self-reinvention in a psychological vacuum evokes the equine protagonist of War Horse, who weaves willy-nilly across the battle-lines of World War I—though Mr. Romney can only wish he could demonstrate a bit of the thoroughbred’s hard-earned valor.

And as it strains to gin up some reliable audience engagement, the nation’s political press is picking up some of Billy Crystal’s manic and mannered vacuity. The Los Angeles Times’s Paul West, for example, professes to find in Mr. Santorum’s kitchen-sink culture crusading on the Michigan hustings the stuff of an “all-out class war” in today’s GOP. The evidence, such as it is, is heavy on the cheap symbolism, and distinctly light on the policy specifics. Mr. Santorum took time out from the Michigan battle royale, Mr. West notes, to attend the opening race of the new NASCAR season in Daytona and allude to Mr. Romney’s privileged upbringing—while also muffing a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week” to defend recent remarks that depicted expanded federal support for post-secondary education as an Obama-led conspiracy to brainwash the nation’s youth. (Santorum’s anti-college shtick bears quoting at length, since it wildly mischaracterizes both Obama’s plan—which would supplement high-school curricula with vocational study for workers who aren’t college bound—and since it is so richly steeped in paranoid looniness: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his own image.”)

But for such clownish posturing to qualify as modest-scale class revolt—let alone as “all-out class war”—some troops would have to be massing somewhere. Instead, debate appearances and ads at the height of the Santorum-Romney showdown turn typically on small-bore issues such as who is the more authentically conservative of the candidates, or which personality in the race is more gauzily “American” or “successful.” Mr. Santorum dare not make too much in Michigan of Mr. Romney’s opposition to the Obama administration’s successful 2009 bailout of the auto industry, since Mr. Santorum, too, attacked the measure. Likewise, Mr. Romney dare not depict Mr. Santorum as a wild-eyed extremist in the Kulturkampf for the simple reason that evangelical voters bulk large among the exact blue-collar base that remains so stubbornly disenchanted with the specter of Mr. Romney as the nation’s next Equity-Fund-Manager-in-Chief.

Mr. Romney’s paralysis here is all the more striking since Mr. Santorum is all but begging for such attacks with outbursts such as his recent admission in a Michigan stem-winder that an entirely anodyne 1960 JFK speech on church-state separation “made me want to throw up”—and his later explanation, during his red-meat interview on This Week, that he viewed JFK as a dangerous “absolutist” when it came to evicting religious believers from the public square. (For diehard pundits determined to tease out class confrontation from culture-war fluff, it also bears repeating that mocking Mitt Romney’s high-corporate pedigree is just what any smart opponent of Mitt Romney does—just ask Newt Gingrich, or the no-less well-born shade of Ted Kennedy.)

All this palpable longing for the base-versus-establishment plotlines of the high-Reagan era GOP calls to mind the inert nostalgia of this Oscar season, from the precious highbrow reveries of Midnight in Paris to the formal jouissance of The Artist. Still, our political prognosticator-class doesn’t have to succumb to despair just yet. There’s still time to bring in the players from Cirque du Soleil; after all, Santorum likes to boast of his own pedigree as a second-generation immigrant, and Mitt Romney did his mission work in France.

Admiral Gen. Shabazz Aladeen (NBC)

Was Mr. Baron Cohen, who co-starred in Hugo, even planning on attending as Admiral Gen. Shabazz Aladeen from  The Dictator, a mockumentary about a Middle Eastern tyrant from the fictional Republic of Wadiya?

Well, now that the powers of be say that he can't do it, the British comedian is going to milk all the publicity from this non-scandal as possible. And he's going to do it in character. On the Today show. Poor Ann Curry.

Here's the "official statement" from the Admiral, as uploaded to YouTube today. It begins, "Good morning Great Satan of America! How are you? I am fine." And it just gets better from there...

Then the Admiral phoned into Today, demanding his tickets be returned:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Best line:

"The only movies shown in my country are the ones written and starring me. I recently remade The Kings' Speech, except my character had no stutter and sided with Hitler."

With all the free publicity this has brought to his new movie, it's not inconceivable that Sacha Baron Cohen paid the Academy to ban him. And we're not so sure he won't show up as Shabazz Aladeen anyway. If they kick him out...so much the better, right? Any press is good press, if you've made a career out of punking half of Hollywood.

Schoenaerts, juiced up on his (and his cattle’s) own supply.

Competing for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar, the Belgian entry Bullhead is pretty much what experience has taught me is a characteristic example of filmmaking from Belgium—a dark, gruesome, sickening but extremely original work that is both repellent and fascinating. It’s about a vicious, bullying cattle farmer named Jacky who swings a shady deal with a Mafia meat trader that results in the murder of a federal cop investigating the use of illegal hormones in meat-packing plants. Jacky is played with ferocious power by coarse, craggy newcomer Matthias Schoenaerts, whose brawny, menacing swagger masks a sad, desperate emptiness that reminds me of the first time the screen unveiled the terrifying impact of Ralph Fiennes’s Nazi camp commander in Schindler’s List. Jacky has the same bulk, constantly pumped on injections of hormones and steroids to hide a devastating secret. Twenty years earlier, when he was a kid, he was assaulted by a brute named Bruno Scheper, who smashed his genitals with a brick. Jacky has spent his life trying to look and act masculine, overdoing the testosterone to grow a beard, expand his chest and get a deep voice and ripped muscles as a masquerade. Meanwhile, his family has held a grudge against the Scheper family, not only for what they did to destroy Jacky’s manhood, but for their mob connections, which have struck fear in everyone who opposes them. Jacky’s best friend, Diederik, was the only witness, but his father forbade him to tell the cops the truth. It all went down in the books as an accident. But Jacky has been waiting all these years for revenge and redemption, and the dirty-meat double-cross is fate surfacing at last. Now he has a chance to put the Schepers away, at the same time reconnecting with Lucia Scheper, an old flame who is the sister of the notorious Bruno, with his old friend Diederik, who is a homosexual informer in love with one of the cops he’s working for, and with Bruno himself, who is now a mental patient.

You can’t accuse Bullhead (the title refers to both the abattoir where Jacky slaughters the bulls and to Jacky himself, since he identifies with the animals he injects with hormones) of being hackneyed. The labyrinthine story, with a myriad cast of sinister characters, including two crooked mechanics who switch the tires on the BMW that is involved in the murder of the hormone investigator, is so complicated and overplotted I can’t even describe it with clarity. I can tell you only that this is a film unlike anything I’ve seen before—harrowing, haunting and sordid. Be forewarned, it is not for the squeamish. But take a chance and you will be rewarded with a work of nightmarish force that is unforgettable.

rreed@observer.com

BULLHEAD

Running Time 124 minutes

Written and Directed by Michael R. Roskam

Starring Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeroen Perceval and Jeanne Dandoy

3/4