Judd Apatow Not Funny Enough For Oscars...

... that's what I'm gleaning from the below, anyway.

So James Franco is totally over his Oscars hosting stint, which happened back in February. In fact, this is the first time he's spoken about it since he high tailed it from the Shrine Auditorium, abandoning his own after party in favour for a flight straight to New York.

Talking to Playboy, he claims he said to producers, "I don't know why you hired me, because you haven't given me anything. I just don't think this stuff's going to be good.'" As for them putting him into a replica of Monroe's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend dress: "I was so pissed about that I was deliberately going to fall onstage and hopefully my dress would fall off or something - they couldn't blame that on me; I was in high heels... The plan had been that I was going to sing as Cher and then Cher was going to come out onstage; that got axed when Cher and the song from 'Burlesque' weren't nominated. I told them, 'Look, this is the thing people are going to talk about, the images they will take away from the show... I just didn't want to fight anymore, even when they said, 'You'll come out as Marilyn Monroe. It'll be funny.' Me in drag is not funny. Me in drag as Cher trying to sing like her is a thing. That didn't happen, so then I just didn't want to argue anymore... I was going with their program; I wanted to do the material they gave me, not be one of the many cooks doing the writing. There were a lot of cooks who shouldn't have been cooking but were allowed to. There were some cooks my manager tried to bring in, like Judd Apatow, who wrote some very funny stuff that wasn't used... After the show everybody was so happy, and Bruce Cohen, the show's producer, hugged me and said, 'Steve Spielberg just told me it was the best Oscars ever!'... As far as having low energy or seeming as though I wasn't into it or was too cool for it, I thought, Okay Anne [Hathaway] is going the enthusiastic route (mostly). I've been trained as an actor to respond to circumstances, to the people I'm working with, and not force anything. So I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that's how I was trying to do those lines. I felt kind of trapped in that material. I felt, This is not my boat. I'm just a passenger, but I'm going down and there's no way out."