Eddie Murphy has been confirmed as the host of next year’s Brett Ratner-produced telecast of the Academy Awards, thereby guaranteeing that the 2012 Oscars will either be the best or the worst Oscars ever. Perhaps both. Here are some canned “quotes” invented by someone who works in PR:

“Eddie is a comedic genius, one of the greatest and most influential live performers ever,” said Ratner. “With his love of movies, history of crafting unforgettable characters and his iconic performances – especially on stage – I know he will bring excitement, spontaneity and tremendous heart to the show Don [Mischer] and I want to produce in February.”

“I am enormously honored to join the great list of past Academy Award hosts from Hope and Carson to Crystal, Martin and Goldberg, among others,” said Murphy. “I’m looking forward to working with Brett and Don on creating a show that is enjoyable for both the fans at home and for the audience at the Kodak Theatre as we all come together to celebrate and recognize the great film contributions and collaborations from the past year.” [press release via Deadline]

Hey, I love Beverly Hills Cop and Raw and Delirious and James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub just as much as you. But that Eddie Murphy is dead, okay? There could be an Oscars montage of all the movies Murphy never should have made. Let’s keep expectations low, people.

Andy Cohen — the Bravo executive who perniciously fills our lives with endless iterations of squabbling “Real Housewives” who are never actually housewives — was a guest on MSNBC’s execrable “Morning Joe” today, where he helped analyze the crappiness of this year’s Oscar telecast. Was it James Franco’s fault? Did people not care because all the big categories were virtual locks? No, according to Cohen, the P.S. 22 choir was the worst part of the show.

Like, I don’t need to see that. It was just bad. It was just awful. It was horrible. A public school chorus singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I literally — if I wasn’t going to go out to some parties I would have slit ‘em right then. It was the worst. I was looking for a knife to stick in my eyes, it was so terrible. […] We don’t want to see this. It just ruined everything.

That’s right: if Andy Cohen didn’t have totally fabu parties to go to, he LITERALLY would have committed suicide because of children singing. You can read more about this story and the Real Housewives in my new pamphlet “Andy Cohen is a Piece of Sh*t.”

Video below. In fairness — not that Cohen deserves it — just before he says how much he hated the children, he says that he loves public school kids. Children-bashing starts around the 3:30 mark.

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Here’s video of the best montage from last night’s Oscars telecast: the unintentional musicals created by the Gregory Brothers of Autotune the News fame. In the words of James Franco: “Congratulations, nerds.”

And a note to anyone who has autotune and wants to make viral videos: be more like the Gregory Brothers, and less like the guy who aututuned Kirk Douglas’s speech last night:

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I don’t know who, exactly, would sit through three-plus hours of the Oscars, then watch the local news, THEN stay tuned for a late-night show on a Sunday night, but anyone who did was treated to a star-studded episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Specifically, Kimmel did a spoof of a workout infomercial called “humpilates” (like pilates, but with humping hahaha) that featured Scarlett Johansson, Minka Kelly, Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Kelly Ripa, Emily Blunt, Eva Longoria, Sofia Vergara, and Lindsay Lohan. It’s kind of like last year’s “Handsome Men’s Club” sketch, minus the laughs.

Anyway, the whole 7-minute video is below, and I watched it all because I enjoy staring at women in exercise clothes. Aside from that, there are a couple highlights: ScarJo is particularly funny, Jessica Biel’s frantic humping is good for a laugh, and of course I mentioned the women in spandex. Other than that, it’s pretty much a lousy “SNL” sketch with famous beautiful actresses and Kelly Ripa.

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FilmDrunk is going to have all the results of who won this and that at the Academy Awards, but the Oscar telecast fallsinto my realm of coverage, and I’ll come straight out and say it: I loved Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts. Hathaway was her usual manic theater-geek babe, and Franco, in the simplest terms possible, does not give a F about the Oscars. JAMES FRANCO AIN’T CARE. No Oscar host in history has ever tried less than James Franco, and for that I salute him. You’ve heard of performance art? James Franco makes performance graffiti.

Other points of discussion:

• I have a blast by going to an Oscar party every year. It’s got three of my favorite pastimes: drinking, gambling (I won the Oscar pool this year!), and judging people. It’s the best Sunday outside of football season.
• Would you sleep with Mila Kunis, or would you kill a man to sleep with Mila Kunis?
• Jennifer Lawrence wore the evening gown equivalent of a “Baywatch” swimsuit. That is not a complaint.
• Yikes, Kirk Douglas. He makes Al Davis look vivacious. However, once I managed to stop staring at the acres of skin that comprise his earlobes, his little filibuster was pretty funny.
• Hey, I liked The King’s Speech. But Tom Hooper as Best Director? In the words of lina-lamont: “Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, the Coen brothers, and David O. Russell all made extraordinary movies this year that felt like they couldn’t have been made by anyone else, because of the unique and innovative vision they each brought to their respective films.” Tom Hooper is basically Barry Switzer.
• Roman Polanski likes Jeff Bridges’s style:

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