The opening of the 83rd annual Academy Awards focused heavily on the “fresh, hip” MCs Anne Hathaway, 28, and James Franco, 32 — the youngest people ever to host the ceremony.
In the opening montage, Hathaway and Franco raced through scenes of each of the nominated pictures, borrowing from “Inception”‘s dream-within-a-dream premise, in a quest to learn how to properly host the show. They sought the guidance of last year’s co-host Alec Baldwin who quipped, “If this were my dream, I’d be hosting the Oscars. [It’s] a dream inside a dream. You’ve been ‘Inceptioned!’”
The montage notably left out “Toy Story 3” and “127 Hours” for which Franco was nominated — instead inexplicably putting in a clip of the two driving in the “Back to the Future” DeLorean.
The highlighting of their age continued when a perky Hathaway and a laconic Franco took to the stage, calling out to their mother and grandmother respectively. Hathaway’s mom called out from the audience for her to stand up straight. “Really mommy?” asked Hathaway. “In front of a billion people?”
Kirk Douglas, 94, although having suffered from a stroke, took the stage and milked his moment with a torturously slow reveal of the “Best Supporting Actress” winner. But when Melissa Leo was finally announced as the winner, she asked the legend to pinch her. In between sighs, Leo slipped a few muted expletives into her speech, saying “When I saw Kate [Winslet] do this two years ago, it looked so [bleep] easy.”
