Every couple years, the Academy producers think it's worth the effort to have an animated character present or co-present an award. It's very rarely worth it and it's almost always in the service of upstaging a technical award the producers think nobody cares about. In this case, it was Mark Wahlberg and Ted presenting two Sound awards and using that as an excuse for a slew of jokes about the Jews running Hollywood and how Ted's real name was "Theodore Shapiro." It's not that "Ted" wasn't a gleefully un-PC movie, but it felt more like a "Family Guy"-style detour than anything associated with MacFarlane's hit film. And it wasn't funny. Ted's other joke was about the Hollywood Oscar night orgy, which built up to a punchline involving Jack Nicholson, but either Nicholson had left his seat or he wasn't amused, because the legend left the joke without a closer.

- Daniel Fienberg