A lot of people have put the 2011 Oscar telecast out of their minds. No one wants to remember it. It was unfortunate in so many ways, mostly because that year, the Oscars were hosted by James Franco and Anne Hathaway. I still feel waves of sympathy for Anne because of that. She got so much hate for that night, but at least she TRIED. James Franco did not try. Franco disengaged at one point and he basically left Anne up there alone to try to carry the telecast. It was awful.

In previous interviews, both Hathaway and Franco have discussed the night and how everything went wrong, and at one point, Franco seemed to throw Anne under the bus a little bit, like she was the one who screwed it up. But while Anne recovered – only to inspire Hathahate a few years later – Franco basically fell into a deep hole of avant-garde art projects and impossible smugness. Anyway, Franco has a new interview with New York Magazine to promote a new film and some of his various art projects, and the whole piece is one giant eye-roll. You can read the full piece here. The most interesting part is perhaps Franco’s thoughts on the 2011 Oscars, now five years removed from the situation.

He says he convinced Anne to cohost with him: “Now, sometimes, sadly, people will follow my example or will do things with me, and it won’t go so well for them. When Anne Hathaway decided to host the Oscars with me … She had said no before, and then they asked me to ask her, and I said, “Let’s just do it. It’ll be an adventure,” and then we got a lot of sh-t for it….I probably got more than she did, but she got a lot.

What was so bad about hosting the Oscars? “You know, I think one of the things that happens in film and television and performance-based things is that people will criticize the performers because they’re the face of the piece. We didn’t write the script….In other cases, someone like Steve Martin or Chris Rock will probably have a bigger hand in the writing of the thing, but Anne and I did not.

Whether he regrets the Oscars: “I wasn’t trying to turn the soap opera into something of my own making. I was in their hands. When I was asked to do the Oscars, I thought I’ll do the same thing. Nobody expects me to host the Oscars…So I thought, here’s, again, an opportunity to put myself in their hands, but I’ve never aspired to be the Oscars host. I don’t care really. I’m going to do what they ask me to and do it as well as I can, but I don’t need this to be the best Oscars ever. I’m not getting anything out of that. In the best-case scenario, even if I killed it, it’s not going to help my career, because that’s not what it’s based on. It was an experiment.

What he learned: “Nobody cares if you disrupt a soap opera, but if you go and host the Oscars and they get even an inkling of you trying to subvert it in any way or punk it in any way, people are going to get pissed.”

[From Vulture]

I just feel sort of empty about this. Like, Franco’s overwhelming hipster ambivalence has made me ambivalent as well. Do I think that it’s revisionist history to say that he got more sh-t than Anne Hathaway? Absolutely. She got a ton of crap for it, but she handled herself like a professional and she overcame it. Do I think Franco’s a douche for basically throwing producers and writers under the bus? Sure. Do I think he was trying to do high-level performance art to subvert the Oscars? Um, no. He was just high, weak and boring.

Here are some photos of Franco at the Tribeca Film Festival a few days ago.

Photos courtesy of WENN.