Seth MacFarlane: Creepy Imitator, Oscars Host: The New Yorker When writing about Seth MacFarlane for this magazine, I sat down with MacFarlane's father, who proudly described how when Seth was a kid, he used to lie in front of the TV, watching hours of cartoons and carefully drawing the characters onscreen. MacFarlane, Sr., kept these drawings and showed them to me. The crude renditions of Fred and Wilma Flintstone really were incredible. Not because they were proof of MacFarlane's great artistic gifts but, rather, for how they demonstrated what an incredible imitator MacFarlane could be. MacFarlane's high gifts of parroting were on full display last night, as he took the stage in the guise of a suave Hollywood m.c. - designer suit, sparkly smile, light footwork. Now, this was a guy who - by all accounts - who came to Hollywood as a pudgy twenty-one-year-old cartooning ingénue with coke-bottle glasses and a bowl cut. But, over the past fifteen years, fuelled by his "Family Guy" fortune, MacFarlane has morphed from unseen toiler into camera-ready celebrity. On the stage, he looked trim and freshly juice-cleansed, breezily dancing with hunks like Channing Tatum and Eddie Redmayne, as if he, too, had always been in the spotlight. As I watched him wink and smile, sing and dance, with the entire world forced to watch, I kept thinking, Dreams really do come true, don't they, Seth? Now, for some of us billion or so TV-audience members, MacFarlane is familiar as a host. He has m.c.ed Comedy Central's bawdy roasts of David Hasselhoff and Charlie Sheen. Sample jokes from that go-round: "Charlie, you claim to have tiger blood, but with all the porn stars you've banged, I'm guessing it's just Tiger Woods's blood"; "He's the reason a dick with cocaine on it is called a Sheenis." So, by comparison, MacFarlane cleaned up his act for the ABC broadcast. Even so, you can put lipstick on a pig, but, in the end, MacFarlane came off as kind of a pig, as he made fun of women for being too thin, too old, too naked. How sophisticated is it to call the pretty, popular girls sluts? I had to stand up and move away when he turned his sights on the lovely black nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for Best Actress. I felt sick imagining where MacFarlane might go. So when he simply made a joke about George Clooney sleeping with her down the road, I felt my body relax. In talking to Seth about his sense of humor, I asked him about his penchant for making fun of those not like him - women and minorities seem to get particular attention from the MacFarlane machine. Seth told me this was "guilty pleasure" humor. I asked him about actresses, like Drew Barrymore, who appeared on "Family Guy" with a little thought bubble above her head with unicorns dancing. "You ever dated an actress?" he asked. There's plenty of unicorns up there. I have never dated an actress, but, these days, MacFarlane dates lots. I guess that's what makes him so smart about women. I wondered last night if his angry-outsider brand of humor, usually delivered by fat cartoon people, still worked with this new shimmering Dior-suited being, center stage. Center stage is where MacFarlane placed himself, and, in the end, the night was a celebration of his performance - not everyone else's. The long opening number with his childhood hero William Shatner, which focussed on how he performed, felt like when the best man takes the microphone at the wedding and launches in to a way-too-long story about himself. And, of course, since we're all obsessed with MacFarlane, we, too, could laugh at the weird Shatner joke about MacFarlane coming out of the closet in the future. Now, Seth MacFarlane is thirty-nine, and I am - barely - a part of the generation that he's supposed to be appealing to. But I felt nostalgic last night for the Academy Awards of yore, when I sat on a couch with friends and watched everyone be glamorous and semi-respectable and we got to be gross and snarky. MacFarlane broke through that boundary last night, and suddenly the bitter asshole on the couch was up there on the stage, lost somewhere between a big smile and a sneer. Read Amy Davidson on Seth MacFarlane's hostile hosting, Sasha Weiss on Oscar fashion, John Cassidy on rational reasons to watch the ceremony, David Denby's roundup of the evening, and more Academy Awards coverage. Photograph by Mark Davis/WireImage/Getty.