Seth MacFarlane, misogynistic Oscar host

It is the nature of the world we live in that less than 12 hours after the Academy Awards finished, it has been widely noted that Seth MacFarlane made a whole lot of misogynistic jokes at this year’s Oscars. He also described Jessica Chastain’s character in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the ultra-driven women who through sheer force of will made the raid on Osama bin Laden possible, as “a celebration of every woman's innate ability to never ever let anything go.” In this context, the more standard, easy-target knocks— the kind of joke almost any host would make in our tabloid era — about Rihanna and Chris Brown’s ongoing train-wreck relationship and the hairiness of the Kardashians seemed even more mean-spirited. But even while Adele and Michelle Obama and Jennifer “Cinderella” Lawrence were creating the show’s highlights, Twitter was doing something even more unsettling than MacFarlane — it was going absolutely HAM on Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart, the one for appearing to care what we think too much, the other for caring way too little. Even people who hated MacFarlane’s performance could find fault with Hathaway and her trembling theater girl thing or with KStew and her refusal to find a comb or look like she gives a shit. “It's almost like we were culturally conditioned to aggressively police women who fail to satisfy a very narrow concept of likeability,” the culture critic Lili Loofbourow tweeted — which is exactly right.