The Hollywood Reporter isn't any kinder:

Because it’s important to get this out of the way, both presenting and hosting the Oscars are hard work. Thankless, even. For proof, let me put together a montage from the 84th Annual Academy Awards.

Perhaps this is just another thing to blame Brett Ratner for, since his mouth cost him the gig and Eddie Murphy went with him, forcing the Academy to make the safe choice of calling on Billy Crystal to host for the ninth time.  

And somewhere, against all odds, James Franco is buying drinks for everybody. The colossal hosting disaster from last year is now forgotten by the safe, unfunny, retro-disaster that was Crystal making jokes that he laughed at repeatedly and overseeing an Oscars telecast that was as poorly paced as any in recent memory.

While it’s true that the Oscar host gets too much blame when it goes wrong, there was nary a comedic bit from Crystal that didn’t seem like it came from the prior decade or was as obvious as a crying baby in church. If the Academy wanted safe, it got safe, but it also got what seemed like a lounge act that was entirely too chummy and self-satisfied.

But Crystal is just the rod with nowhere to run in a lightning storm. More blame should be placed on the direction of the show, which started deathly slow (after the predictable and no longer fresh or creative video spoof from Crystal) and then got shockingly more slow as it went along.

In years past, the formula that always undid any awards show was simple (and yet few ever fixed it): Start strong, have a bloated and boring middle that then made a mess and a rush of the ending, which is always the most anticipated part of the show. How many times through the years has an awards telecast ran long or too close to the end time and left people we actually tuned in for – best actors, directors and best film winners – to race through their acceptance speeches and thus let all the air out of the room?

Well, inexplicably, this year’s Oscars managed to make that formula look brilliant. It started slow, got slower, bloated the entire affair with montages, glazed the eyes of viewers (“What, was that really the best director award?”) and then ladled on even more montages until it culminated in the predictable – if warranted – crowning of The Artist. About the only thing to raise a pulse was Meryl Streep winning again (in what most people will consider an upset), and that’s only going to piss off viewers even more.

So, yeah, not the Oscars' finest moment. And when it comes nowhere near the ratings of the Grammys, the cherry will drop on top.

For much of the night, there was an annoying feedback coming from the main stage microphone that people complained about with ferocity online. Did no one monitor the sound? There also was no palpable sense of excitement or entertainment. And here’s where it gets a little tricky for the Hollywood community. Yes, so many people in so many varied categories have done great work, and they need to be feted for that, but in the real world when people are watching the Oscars, they don’t really care as much about sound, editing, makeup, etc.

The trick is to include those awards but to keep up the excitement level as a broadcast for people who really only want to know about the acting categories, the director and best film. Sure, film fans have plenty of other categories they love – foreign film, documentary, etc. But the average viewer wants to be entertained while they wait for the big categories.

What they got instead was a ceaseless parade of montages that hammered home the same theme: Movies are magic. They make the world a better place. They make life worth living. Everybody gets swept away at the movies. Isn’t it magical?

First off, stop dropping the anvil on us. Secondly, at some point the level of self-congratulation about how your work makes the life of The Little People more magical begins to feel condescending, arrogant and annoying. So how about three of those montages instead of, what, 33?

The pacing was sloppy and slow until -- hey, here we go -- best actors. People could be forgiven for having nodded off by then or perhaps, lulled into a stupor, missing the whole thing because they walked to the fridge or went to the sink to splash cold water on their faces.

Worse for Crystal, the Ellen DeGeneres commercials were like some kind of counterattack. She was funny in them. Like The Artist, people became mesmerized and leaned into their sets, wishing Ellen would jump out and host. Chris Rock – yes, please host. Tina Fey – please write and host! It was one of those nights.

And not a good night.

Here were a few worries I had: That Sacha Baron Cohen would steal the thunder (a bad precedent – look for one of the Transformers next year or some superhero in a costume or Murphy as Norbit or some Disney balloon). I worried that the great Christopher Guest& Players bit would be the highlight (outside of some really sweet acceptance speeches, it probably was). I worried that people were switching over to The Walking Dead or Luck.

On the other hand, I was happy for people who helped save the show – Emma Stone, Christopher Plummer, even Angelina Jolie sticking her leg out with authority helped distract from the feeling that the clock was melting. There was even a macaroni-and-cheese commercial that provided a ray of light.

Just a guess here – but since this makes two fairly horrendous Oscars in a row, the Academy will have to really rethink the process next year. And not to guess about others' feelings, but you can bet that other critics will revile this effort as well.

For all of this talk about how the movies are magic (montage, montage, montage), maybe someone in the business could have sprinkled some of that magic on this telecast. It certainly didn’t transport us to another world – unless that world was a show on another channel.

Brett Ratner got lucky.

It probably didn't seem that way in November, when he lost his gig producing the Oscars after a casually homophobic comment. But his stupidity saved him from having to perform the delicate dance the Oscars struggle more and more to perform each year. To wit: Begging the people watching at home to go to the movies more, even as they celebrate films that may not be popular with those audiences. It's a difficult task that comes down to finding the slim overlap of good and popular.

Sunday's show was awfully boring, in part because it strived so desperate to be popular when it should have just embraced good. It played it safe by rolling out the same old tributes to old films, which only created the impression that Hollywood's best days are behind it.  The least successful attempt to educate and entertain at once came when actors appeared in taped interviews doing what actors do worst: pontificating about the importance of their craft. (No one in the real world needs to hear Robert DeNiro use the word "misery" again when describing moviemaking.)

As bad as it was, it could have been much, much worse.

Ratner would have been a move toward appealing to the lowest common denominator. But there's no appealing to the lowest common denominator in a year when "The Artist" happened to dominate.  You can't remind people how much they love the movies by praising a movie most of them haven't seen.

Ratner was replaced by the very skilled Brian Grazer. If this was the best show Grazer could produce, you can imagine how poorly Ratner would have performed the delicate dance. Just look at the drop-off in quality from the second "X-Men" film to the one Ratner directed. Balancing acts aren't his thing.  But they shouldn't be anybody's thing. The funniest person at Sunday's ceremony was also the only one who most decidedly chose a side. Presenting in the animated categories, former Oscar host Chris Rock ridiculed the notion that voicing animated films is hard. He imitated himself being fed his lines and shouting them -- and then collecting a million dollars.

Rock may not have captured the mood in the room, but he said what everyone in the home audience was thinking.

Billy Crystal, who gamely took on hosting duties when Eddie Murphy bailed out with Ratner, could have benefitted from a similarly strong point of view. His best joke came at the expense of the Republican presdential candidates, as he compared them to Christian Bale's menagerie of daffy and menacing characters.

But given his questionable decisions this year, maybe it was best that he stuck mostly to the middle of the road. A joke he probably thought was very safe -- reviving his Sammy Davis Jr. imitation -- set of a twitterstorm because he did it in blackface.

The night's best performance was by far the riskiest: Cirque du Soleil performed a riveting aerial number. It didn't even pretend to have a connection with this year's films, but there's no quibbling with people gutsy enough to do mid-air gymnastics.  One skit managed to celebrate Hollywood history while simultaneously celebrating artistic risk-taking. Christopher Guest's band of usual suspects imagined a 1939 test audience critiquing "The Wizard of Oz." The viewers agreed: Less Dorothy. Fred Willard wanted more monkeys.

The point of view, bluntly: Sometimes audiences are dumb.

And we are. But that doesn't mean moviemakers should cater to us. It means they should lead us into danger. (Preferably while acting humble about it, and never complaining about anything.)

As it stands, the industry prefers to listen to and even act on our stupid insights about more monkeys. Because it's in a tenuous position.  The same technology that has made it more appealing to stay home has made it less appealing to go to the movies. Screen creep has made televisions and phones increasingly valid options for watching films - and added ubiquitous cell phones to the list of moviegoing indignities. (Endless advertisements are also on the list, along with the talkers who have ruined movies since before talkies.)

Handing out the award for Best Picture, Tom Cruise had to keep a straight face as he praised "the shared experience of being in a theater with hundreds of other people."

Maybe the academy selected Cruise to deliver that line because his "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol," was the rare movie that actually benefits from being seen with an audience. Your neighbors' gasps actually add to the soundtrack of its vertigo-inducing sequences.

But "Mission Impossible" isn't the kind of movie the academy celebrates in the major categories. Not most years, anyway.

Every Oscars, academy members have to choose between praising crowd-pleasers in the hopes that doing so might encourage more movie-going, or highlighting smaller, more challenging films they actually consider good.  Unfortunately for this year's show, this was one of those years the academy decided to go with good. While pretending good was also popular.

This isn't a criticism of "The Artist." It's just that an awful lot of people won't pay to watch a French-made film that's black and white and silent. Not for the same price as "Ghost Protocol." 

(CNN) -- Sunday night's Oscar telecast was enough to make you drop your knitting and stare in amazement at the contortions being performed on stage at the none-dare-call-it-Kodak Theater -- and not necessarily by Cirque du Soleil, whose performance was one of the evening's weirder moments.

Was it really just a year and a day ago that the Academy Awards made its big play for youth, via the double-edged disaster of James Franco and Anne Hathaway? OK, that didn't work. At all. But last night's full-frontal embrace of the past -- punctuated in no small way by the choice of a silent movie as Best Picture -- was a back flip, a half-twist, and a landing in deep denial.

It wasn't the Academy's fault that the show's director-elect Brett Ratner self-destructed, or that Ratner's hand-picked host Eddie Murphy bailed, or that the plucky Billy Crystal had to be called in to host a show he hadn't done since 2004. It isn't Crystal's fault that he's 63 years old. But someone -- producer Brian Grazer, perhaps -- should answer for why a show celebrating an industry in so much trouble chose to cast itself as something so profoundly passé.

At a time when audiences are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the very "theatrical experience" the Academy spends so much time championing, why would the show's writers and producers characterize the idea of going to the movies as something quaint, nostalgic and on the way out? Time and again, participants reflected on moviegoing as something they remembered fondly from their childhoods. They might have been talking about the Civil War.

It was a strange tone to take, especially since anyone who pays any attention at all to the media -- or lives in Hollywood, or talks to other people -- knew that "The Artist" was poised to win Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (which it did). When you have an 800-pound metaphor pending delivery, why add insult to injury?

It didn't help, of course, that the show was being held in the erstwhile Kodak Theater, which had a name change since the venerable company filed for bankruptcy. Crystal never mentioned the word "Kodak," probably believing that it might make people in the film industry nervous that the company synonymous with film would be going out of business.

But it wasn't the issue of changing technology that gave last night's show a stale air. It was the issue of unchanging taste. Crystal, game as usual, opened the show with the same shtick he's used all of the nine times he's hosted, including the comedy montage of mock scenes from nominated movies. It's never had any edge and isn't intended to, but the general tone of the comedy was bloodless, and even blinkered: Delivering one gag about the advanced age of Best Supporting Actor nominees Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, the host suggested that next year's show would be sponsored by Flomax (the prostate drug).

This might have been funny, if 1) the disconnect between the Oscars and anyone under 30 wasn't so pronounced; 2) Plummer and von Sydow weren't among the classiest guys in the room; and 3) they weren't that much older than a lot of other people present. Plummer, showing that age is what you make of it, delivered the evening's most eloquent acceptance speech. But as deserving as he was (for "Beginners"), he couldn't help but point up the industry's affection for the past, especially its own.

No one can deny Best Actress Meryl Streep is almost routinely spectacular, or that she gave a marvelous performance last year, albeit in a mediocre movie ("Iron Lady"). But there were several supposed sure things going into last night's awards. And the only one that didn't come true was Viola Davis' selection as Best Actress for "The Help."

Granted, Streep's last win was 13 nominations ago (1983, "Sophie's Choice"). But given that Octavia Spencer took home the Best Supporting Actress award for "The Help," and got a standing ovation from the Oscar crowd besides, it makes you wonder. It could be that voters thought Davis' screen time was insufficient for the Best Actress prize, or that she wasn't the center of the story (Emma Stone was, arguably). But that's probably giving the Academy more credit than it deserves.

The fact is, Spencer gave a much broader, comedic performance; Davis' work spoke to the real pain of racism. Similarly, the choice for Best Documentary -- "Undefeated," the weakest among a pretty feeble list of nominees -- was about a white football coach and his black high school team, the kind of "Blind Side" vehicle that Academy voters gravitate to. Why? Because it makes them feel good without straining.

For a town synonymous with left-leaning politics, Hollywood has never looked so starched and conservative. The idea would probably make Rick Santorum recoil in horror, but Hollywood's embrace of the past is rooted in the same thing as Republican primary voters' embrace of reactionary candidates: A profoundly uncertain future. I like "The Artist" as much as anyone (OK, probably a little less), but for all its charms, it's not a forward-looking film. And last night's Oscars was not a forward-looking show. It was rooted in a kind of paralysis, the kind that accompanies a deep-seated fear