Jon Stewart at the Oscars

The (mixed) reviews are in.

New York Newsday

Stewart did exactly what a contemporary Academy Awards host is supposed to do. He's supposed to keep the zingers coming fast enough to work the room while nudging and winking at those of us watching at home.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his cappers to the interminable, time-filling montages in tribute to "noir" movies, "message" movies and epics. You and I can say "as if" to each such montage and no one would care. Stewart responds to clips of movies about racism, sexism, war, religious persecution and injustice by saying, "And none of those problems ever occurred again."

The Boston Globe

For Jon Stewart fans, it was a night of relief.

The ''Daily Show" anchor didn't sell out to host the Super Bowl of awards shows. He didn't aim for the old-school vaudeville shtick of Billy Crystal to broaden his appeal. He was his Comedy Central self throughout: wry, deadpan, flip, and slightly subversive. His jokes were as sharp as ever, and punctuated with the pregnant pauses that are his trademark.

Pre-filmed comedy sequences contributed to the night's ''Daily Show" flavor. A series of fake TV campaign ads by the nominees was clever. And the clips from classic westerns, arranged with an eye for gay subtext, were a funny razz on the ''Brokeback Mountain" phenomenon. It was a viral video sent to millions of viewers. Naturally, when the lights came up, the camera panned to Heath Ledger, who was smiling.

The Washington Post

"Crash" was not only the film chosen Best Picture at the 78th Academy Awards last night; it was also the sound made by the show itself as, metaphorically speaking, it drove into a wall.

It's hard to believe that professional entertainers could have put together a show less entertaining than this year's Oscars, hosted with a smug humorlessness by comic Jon Stewart, a sad and pale shadow of great hosts gone by.

Stewart began the show drearily, loping through a monologue that lacked a single hilarious joke with the possible exception of "Bjork couldn't be here tonight. She was trying on her Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her."

That was about it -- and Stewart had five months, working with his legions of writers from the "Daily Show" on Comedy Central, to come up with good material. It goes to prove that there's still a big, big difference between basic cable and big-time network television after all.

Salon.com

Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any more wrist-slashingly boring, the boringness collapsed in on itself and became a deadly howling void of terrible sucking from which the light of no star could escape. These Oscars were so hideously uptight, they got pulled down a worm-hole and traveled light-years, on and on, forever, until they finally ended up in the darkest, airless regions of some fat, ultraconservative's welded-on undershorts. Somehow, the roaring vacuum of these Oscars even killed the chi of the Golden Boy, our very own Jon Stewart. He began apologizing within 20 minutes, once he realized he'd never get his ankles out of the anaconda.

How ... HOW did Jon Stewart suck so hard?

I think somebody MADE him suck. I think there was some serious Hollywood penitentiary shower-shanghai going down. Somebody stuck Jon Stewart in the tent with Oscar and made him commit unnatural acts of sucking. I don't want to name names, but I think it was probably J.C. Penney himself.

Walk it off, Jon. Sasha Cohen showed us that you can fall on your ass and still lose with dignity. It's just not America's year.

BBC

A joke about Dick Cheney shooting Bjork's dress - a reference to her swan creation from a few years back - brought the house down.

The Oscars set was designed to evoke the golden era of cinema. But digs at the Democratic Party tend not to go down very well in mainly left-leaning Hollywood, and Stewart made two in quick succession, both greeted with frosty near-silence.

Even more unforgivably for the audience, he repeated the mistake made by Chris Rock last year of attacking the Academy's own, in this case, the Baldwin acting clan. The sharp intake of breath was audible, and Stewart was in danger of seriously flopping.

MTV.com

Though some of the jokes in his opening monologue fell flat and he played much nicer than many might have expected, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart avoided any major pratfalls in his debut Sunday night (March 5) as Academy Awards host

When "Pimp" won for best original song and the group bounded up excitedly and gave (somewhat profane) shout-outs to everyone they could think of — including fellow rapper Ludacris and, just for good measure, Clooney — Stewart seemed genuinely touched.

"How come they're the most excited people out there tonight?" he said. "That's how you accept an Oscar!" Stewart said. He later added, "For those of you keeping score at home, Martin Scorsese, zero; Three 6 Mafia, one."

Assuming he did avoid that feared beat-down from Crowe, only time will tell if Stewart is the next Crystal or one-and-done Letterman. But you can be sure of one thing: He's likely the only host in Oscar history who will find a way to work in a blink-and-you-missed it joke about the toppling of an oversized Oscar statue as a metaphor for the spread of democracy in Iraq while working in a line about James Caan hitting the statue with his sandal. Think about it.

Forbes.com

You would have been more amused Sunday night if you'd revved up your TiVo and played back an evening's worth of "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" reruns while you tracked Oscar winners on the Web.

National Ledger

Jon Stewart seemed to be overcompensating a bit on Sunday night as he struggled with exactly how he should open. His monologue was dry, and while that is his strength it didn't play well in a theater full of humorless elitists.

He didn’t lay a glove on Bush, and what’s up with that? Isn’t that why we tuned in, to see Mr. Liberal get himself in trouble with the Red State Right? Then he sets up what starts out like a winner, noting how “a lot of people say this town is too liberal…out of touch with Mainstream America…a moral black hole where innocence is obliterated in an orgy of sexual gratification and greed…” But then he ends with, “I don’t really have a joke here.”

Why not, for chrissakes? Didn’t this gig pay you to write punch lines?
Hang on, even Jon just told the audience he’s a “loser.” Well put, at least for tonight.

The joke was really his audience, who came across as humorless dolts. Damn Hollywood, learn something about self-deprecating humor. But Nikki hit it pretty well; it was a tough night for Jon Stewart.