Oscar writer and comic Bruce Vilanch was asked by NY Magazine for his thoughts on James Franco’s performance as a co-host of the ceremony this year. Vilanch is one of a team of about four writers responsible for the cringe-worthy out-of-date jokes at this years’ Oscar ceremony. He said that he approved of the idea to use Franco and Hathaway as hosts, but when it came down to it Franco wasn’t experienced enough. Vilanch also denied that Franco was high when he hosted, as many suspected:

Longtime Oscar writer Bruce Vilanch isn’t one to mince words about awards-show hosts, so when we caught up with him last night at the premiere of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, we had to ask him about James Franco and Anne Hathaway, who emceed this year’s poorly received Academy Awards broadcast. “I have to call James Franco and tell him the show’s over,” Vilanch quipped. “He doesn’t know. He took a nap and he woke up in class.” Does Vilanch attribute Franco’s sleepy performance to an actual lack of sleep? “He has so many balls in the air, he didn’t get to town till Thursday before the show on Sunday. And so we e-mailed a lot. But we had a lot of meetings. He had a bunch of people who were writing for him, and if it had been him alone, it would have been different. But it was him and Anne Hathaway, and they both had to be serviced. So there was a lot of communication beforehand. But he didn’t get there.”

“I don’t think he realized how big a deal it is to do it until he was actually confronted with it,” Vilanch continued. “I think he thought he would kind of … I don’t know what he thought. I thought maybe it was a performance-art prank, and then I realized he sincerely wanted to do it. But it’s outside of those guys’ comfort zones. The only people who know how to host those shows are people who get up onstage every night and say, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. A funny thing happened … ‘ Or people like Bette [Midler] who get up and sing all night and tell stories.”

Still, Vilanch had been in favor of the pairing, which was suggested by producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer. “I told them what I thought. I liked the two of them [James and Anne], and what I like about them is they both hosted Saturday Night Live successfully, and what that meant is they knew all about working live, with little rehearsal, with many script changes, and a lot of pressure. And that’s sort of half of the job right there of the Oscar show.”

One last question: Was Franco really stoned, as rumored?

“No, he wasn’t high,” Vilanch said. “I was with him, and he wasn’t high. And I asked him, ‘Are you high, and can I have some?’ And he said no to both.”

[From NYMag.com via Huffington Post]

Here’s the thing – Franco did phone it in, and while I’ve defended him in the past I’ve come around on this and do find him to be an arrogant prick now. He could have prepared better, he could have looked like he wanted to be there and he could have tried. I’ll repeat what I said after the Oscars and still believe now, though – the jokes sucked and no one could have made them funny. The ceremony was extremely long and boring as usual and that’s in no way the fault of the hosts. As I’ve also mentioned before, when Jon Stewart hosted in 2006 and brought his A game and a team of writers from the Daily Show he got panned too. There’s a tendency to blame the host (and Franco is an understandable target given his attitude) when blame should be placed on the writers and producers for putting out a long, unwieldy and in no way entertaining mess.

Franco is a sulky bitch who can’t handle criticism, however. He scrawled a message on a picture of Villant in response to these comments. He wrote a quote for Villant in Perez Hilton style MS Paint style: “James f’cked up the Oscars. Trust me, I know comedy. I mean, come on, I write for Bette Midler.” He’s since deleted the picture, but it’s out there now.

This isn’t the first time Franco has done this. Earlier this month he scrawled a message to his school newspaper, The Yale Daily News, on a photo of himself earlier in response to a negative article they ran about him. He wrote “F’ck the Yale Daily News”

Note to James Franco: try Picnik.com to add quotes and text to photos. You can pick from several different fonts, but they won’t give your petulant photo responses the grade school quality they deserve.

Photos are of Franco outside The Daily Show on 1/25/11. Credit: Fame