Seth MacFarlane Slammed by Parents Television Council
The group posts a petition urging the Academy not to invite the "Family Guy" creator back next year.
Seth MacFarlane tweeted that there was "no way" he'd host the Oscars again. That’s not good enough for some folks who were offended by some of the entertainer’s jokes that night about women, minorities, Christians and Jews.
At the top of that list is the Parents Television Council, and on Friday, the group was touting an online petition to ensure the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences “does not invite Seth MacFarlane to host the Oscars" again.
On its website, the PTC also posted several clips from the Oscar telecast, along with a warning: “Graphic content may be shown on the content and video tabs.” Each clip is labeled with a different offense: “anti-Semitic,” “sexist” and “orgy.”
“Seth MacFarlane has built a career on programs that wallow in misogyny and anti-Semitism; joke about violence against women, rape, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality; and even ridiculing children with disabilities,” the petition reads. “Knowing this, the Academy still chose to invite MacFarlane to host the 2013 Academy Awards.”
STORY: A Female Film Executive Defends Seth MacFarlane's Oscars Performance
MacFarlane, though, is a frequent target of the PTC, with perhaps its most high-profile criticism coming after his Family Guy TV show featured a mean female character with Down syndrome and implied former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was her mother.
If history is a guide, MacFarlane won’t take PTC’s petition too seriously. In an interview with the Advocate magazine five years ago, he said that criticism from the PTC is akin to “getting hate mail from Hitler… they can suck my d--k as far as I’m concerned.”
The PTC, while non-partisan, is considered in Hollywood to be a right-of-center organization. But critics of this year's Oscar show come from both sides of the political spectrum. Two California state legislators, Hannah-Beth Jackson and Bonnie Lowenthal, both Democrats, wrote a letter to AMPAS president Hawk Koch saying, in part, that MacFarlane’s performance during the Oscar telecast “reduced our finest female actresses to caricatures and stereotypes, degrading women as a whole and the filmmaking industry itself."
Meanwhile, some conservatives are coming to MacFarlane’s defense. John Nolte at Breitbart.com, for example, wrote: “If you can't mock actresses willing to bare their breasts or tweak someone over their accent or use 'gay' to get a laugh or make a joke about a 150-year-old assassination or tease about the tendency of some Christians to get a little stuffy -- what's left?”
Email: Paul.Bond@THR.com
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