In case you haven’t heard, James Franco is a busy guy. He acts! He writes! He makes art! He’s coming to Broadway! He currently attends Yale and has attended UCLA, Columbia and NYU! Last week, he completed a correspondence course while relieving himself at a urinal.
The only thing he apparently didn’t have time for was rehearsing for his gig as Oscar host.
At the Academy Awards show last month, Franco looked bored on the stage at the Kodak Theatre while his co-host, Anne Hathaway strained to carry the broadcast, and was ripped apart by viewers and critics alike. “The 83rd Annual Academy Awards will likely be remembered as the night James Franco couldn’t act like a host,” the Hollywood Reporter sniped. The Post’s Lou Lumenick echoed the sentiment of others, branding the telecast, “Worst. Oscars. Ever.”
In fact, the Oscars may have marked a turning point for the 21st century Renaissance Man. America is no longer infatuated with Franco — and a wave of backlash has begun.
According to Zeta Interactive, a local digital marketing agency that analyzes online activity, Franco’s popularity took a huge hit after the show. His positive tonal buzz dropped 15 points to 74 percent. Before the Academy Awards, the words most-often associated with Franco on Twitter, blogs and message boards were “celebrity,” “Oscars” and “movie.” After the show, the most common words and phrases were “failed,” “not good” and “boring.”
Even Yale has turned on its celeb scholar. The school newspaper took a shot at him last month by writing in a blog post: “Your Twitter sort of sucks.”
It’s hard to tell exactly why someone jumps the shark with the fickle public, but with Franco the seeds may have been sown in the past few months due to massive overexposure.
“I do get the feeling,” says noted Hollywood publicist Michael Levine, “that if I go into my bathroom and turn on the hot water faucet, he’s likely to come out.”
The public perception of Franco has morphed. He’s gone from a character actor best-known for his turn in the “Spider-Man” movies to a guy who’s famous for the insane amount of work he can cram into a day.
Very little ink gets spent these days on his regular acting work. Instead, outlets celebrate just how many places he flies per week, how little he sleeps and how he juggles all of the creative projects in his life.
The New York Times, gushing last week in yet another article on how busy Franco is, referred to the actor as a “polymath.” Please. There are plenty of people in Hollywood who don’t boast about their achievements. The Coen brothers, for example, write, direct and edit most of their award-winning movies. Meanwhile, Ethan Coen also pens short stories and poetry on the side, but you don’t see the Times breaking out the word “polymath” to describe him.
The thing is, at some point, Franco — either proactively or by backing into it — decided that he was going to be “The Hardest-Working Dude in Show Business.”
At first, Franco’s hectic lifestyle was charming. This is America, and we like people who hustle — especially movie stars who could otherwise be spending their time “winning” with suitcases full of coke.
But then, Franco’s narrative got shoved down our throats so often, we began to suspect that it was just another sales job, no different from those other carefully crafted Tinseltown p.r. spins, like “It’s an amicable divorce” or “Tom Cruise is totally normal.”
Franco’s brand of “busy, busy, busy!” was novel initially, and it boosted his profile, landing him the biggest hosting gig in the world. But it was bound to self-destruct. No one likes a braggart. No one likes to be constantly reminded that you’re attending an Ivy League school. Franco even failed to turn up at any Oscar after-parties, opting to take a red-eye back to the East Coast to attend a class at Yale.
What was once quirky now feels smug. That is a shame, because the guy has great acting chops. He got a well-deserved Oscar nod for carrying “127 Hours,” a movie about a hiker trapped under a rock that should have been as boring as C-SPAN, but wasn’t. His public image is ailing, and the prescription is to pull back.
“Stars [should not be] that available,” says p.r. guru Levine. And fragmented brands are rarely the most valuable. That may not be fair, but that’s reality. John Wayne never made a Christmas album, and Marilyn Monroe never presented a show of her sculpture work.
No one is begrudging Franco’s desire to explore creative pursuits privately. Just don’t ask us to applaud when he releases a book of haikus. We’d rather spend our time watching “127 Hours” again.