A friend of mine who attended the Academy Awards sent the following note and asked me to post it here…
Right on that one difference between Ebert's review of Jon Stewart and Tom Shales', beyond the fact that Shales has never known what he's talking about, is that Ebert was there. Most people who were there loved Stewart. He got plenty of laughs, certainly more than Steve Martin the last time he hosted. If it didn't sound that way at home, that's not his fault. I watched a little of it on TiVo when I got home and the audience didn't seem as loud as it did if you were sitting there.
Also wrong to judge how a host is doing by the expressions of the stars sitting in the first ten rows. Those are people who are sitting there with cameras in their faces and they're nervous about being singled out and distracted because they have a lot riding on the evening. Where I sat, we were all howling at Stewart. They liked the monologues. They really liked the lines he did later in the show that seemed improvised because they were mostly commenting on things that had just happened and you should have heard some of the things that went on during the commercial breaks.
After reading some of the reviews that said no one was laughing, I went back and — also through the miracle of TiVo — watched Stewart's monologue again. People were laughing just fine at all but a joke or two, which is all you could ask for. But you're right that the audio on the audience could have been increased a bit.
I get the impression there was a slow bounceback on the laughter in the Kodak Theater. That's when the nature of the room, in part but not wholly due to its size, adds a fraction of a second delay to the time it takes the audience to hear the funny line and also to the time it takes the comedian to hear them laughing. When Victor Borge used to play large amphitheaters, he'd explain the problem to the audience — especially the folks way in the back — and ask them to please laugh a second or two before he said anything funny or it would throw off his timing.
My guess here is that when they sit down in a few months to discuss who'll host the 2007 Oscars, Jon Stewart will be among those considered. Steve Martin and Billy Crystal, if they'll do it, might be ahead of him but he'll be on the list. Unless some promising new contender emerges, we may well see Stewart again next year. Maybe they can crank up the audio on the audience for him.