If only Bob Hope and Johnny Carson could come back from the dead...

Seriously, besides Billy Crystal and onetwo-time host Steve Martin, most Oscar hosts have suffered in the face of high expectations and the reality that they couldn't unleash their full force of funny over an audience full of mostly humorless industry types. Dave Letterman got eaten alive despite a performance most home audiences (well, me) thought was hilarious. Chris Rock dared to actually try to be a tenth as daring as he is in his stand-up act and he was called "insulting" by his non-fans and "boring" by the people who liked him. Ellen DeGeneres was so benign she put people to sleep.

Which is why I wonder why Jon Stewart would accept the Academy's reported invitation to host the ceremony again next year. When he hosted in 2006, he got decidedly mixed reviews, from people who liked his performance to folks like Nikki Finke, who said that Stewart bombed.

Let's face it, folks: The Oscars are three-and-a-half hours of boredom and pomposity that is hopefully punctuated by occasional bits of inspired comedy, intentional or otherwise (our own Sarah Gilbert agrees with me; check out her review). There isn't really much a host, whether it's Dave Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, or the "gold standards" of hosts -- Billy Crystal, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson -- can do to make the show any less of a bloated mess. That's why people have Oscar parties; if they didn't spend time taking bets, getting drunk, and scarfing down sushi, they'd all be asleep before the sound editing awards were completed.

So that's why I'm perplexed at the mixed reviews Jon Stewart is getting for his hosting gig. While Robert Bianco of USA Today seemed to like his performance, others weren't so kind.  Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times, for instance, said he looked "a little nervous", while Cintra Wilson in Salon rhetorically asked, "How.. HOW did Jon Stewart suck so hard?", using words like "tanking", "manic-depressive", and "glum" in her disjointed assesment of his performance. Tom Shales of the Washington Post, who always seems to write about TV as if his job is a chore, said that Stewart "began the show drearily, loping through a monologue that lacked a single hilarious joke," and that even Dave Letterman's much-criticized hosting stint in 1995 was better. Even the AP got into the act, saying Stewart was "too deferential, too nice and too obvious in his targets."