Of this season's 21 episodes, only 5 were hosted by women -- that's 23.8 percent. And of those five women, four had hosted the program before; only the omnipresent Jennifer Lawrence was a new visitor to 30 Rock.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Though there have been vacillations in certain seasons, seasons generally break down 70-30 in favor of male hosts. Perhaps this isn't surprising. Not only do women hosts on "SNL" tend to play pretty, anodyne "girlfriend" characters (try to recall a sketch from either of Anna Faris' episodes!), but the female ensemble on "SNL" has traditionally been very strong, so much so that even some talented female cast members have trouble breaking through. Why book more female hosts if they're not going to get much to do? (This isn't new, either. In the show's first season, 8 of 25 hosts were women, including Candice Bergen twice within two months.)

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And her public finds it all so infuriating.

Hathaway is the subject of more vituperative, angry scrutiny than perhaps any actress working today. "Shut up. Shut up, Anne Hathaway. I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m jealous, but I don’t feel jealousy. I watch her in outtakes, and I feel like she’s not a real person," wrote a blogger for women's-interest site Crushable. "I don’t find her perfection charming. I find it annoying."

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It did not feel like MacFarlane was hosting the entertainment world’s most prestigious event with hundreds of millions of viewers in more than a hundred countries, but an Oscar party for his bros in his parents' basement.

No doubt MacFarlane’s lazy, gratingly unfunny playing-to-the-lowest-common denominator jokes — Jews in Hollywood! Gays in musicals! Women! — are a hit with his fans. But I expected more from the creator of "Family Guy," one of the most successful animated comedy shows on TV. Instead, his lame cracks, the smug grinning and self-congratulatory laughter had the entertainment appeal of watching a kid flicking boogers into the hair of the kid that sits in front of him in English.

The best humor surprises us with its perceptiveness. The best provocative humor — and MacFarlane fancies himself to be quite the provocateur — has the ability to reflect back to us some central truth about ourselves and our culture we’d rather not confront.

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ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Bradley Cooper, "Silver Linings Playbook"
WINNER: Daniel Day-Lewis, "Lincoln"
Hugh Jackman, "Les Misérables"
Joaquin Phoenix, "The Master"
Denzel Washington, "Flight"

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Alan Arkin, "Argo"
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook"
Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Master"
Tommy Lee Jones, "Lincoln"
WINNER: Christoph Waltz, "Django Unchained"

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Jessica Chastain, "Zero Dark Thirty"
WINNER: Jennifer Lawrence, "Silver Linings Playbook"
Emmanuelle Riva, "Amour"
Quvenzhané Wallis, "Beasts of the Southern Wild"
Naomi Watts, "The Impossible"

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Amy Adams, "The Master"
Sally Field, "Lincoln"
WINNER: Anne Hathaway, "Les Misérables"
Helen Hunt, "The Sessions"
Jacki Weaver, "Silver Linings Playbook"

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Though similarities between classic looks are often coincidential, the references can be strategic, too. Jeffrey Monteiro, a fashion expert and former design director at such houses as Derek Lam and Bill Blass, explains that celebrity stylists and handlers borrow from one another "to place themselves [and actresses] in the Hollywood hierarchy," choosing particular dresses to announce a transformation in a star's career, or even to set the tone for an era of fashion.

Monteiro has hand-picked some of the most iconic dresses in Oscar history  — e.g.,  Grace Kelly's classic green gown, Lauren Hutton's 1975 Halston — and the frocks they would inspire years later. But a gown doesn't make the complete look: Though the differences between these styles may be subtle, one celebrity truly owns the look.

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The play, which first ran from 1987 to 2003, is set to return to Broadway after its film adaptation hit with both critics and audiences. "Les Miserables" was revived from 2006 to 2008, but this adaptation will feature less rock-oriented orchestrations and a more naturalistic staging, emphasizing "the gritty lot of the 19th century downtrodden in France," per the New York Times's report.

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If you look at the Oscars before the 1990s, you won't find too many of them handed out for massive physical change. Current nominee Robert DeNiro's 1980 win for his metamorphosis from fighting-weight Jake LaMotta to fat, late-era, has-been Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" was all but unprecedented in its day. And though the actor trained hard for his boxing scenes, it's the weight gain that's remembered -- and it sounds like the easiest part of the performance. To achieve his gone-to-seed look, he spent four months on "an eating binge in Europe" to gain 66 pounds.

Not all Oscar-baiting work comes that pleasurably though. Herewith are our picks for the Oscar's most dramatic physical evolutions of recent years and their relative degree of difficulty.

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Best Actor: Richard Gere, "Arbitrage"

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But if the "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" star had been born several decades later, she wouldn’t have shed a tear, because those same studios that unceremoniously expunged her voice would have begged her to sing as Eliza Doolittle, regardless of her musical merit.

After the unexpected success of 2001’s "Moulin Rouge!" and 2002's "Chicago," a new breed of movie musical was born -- a genre I call the millennial musical -- in which all the songs are performed by musically untrained actors, with scant consideration of vocal caliber. This season's "Les Misérables" not only has its star-studded cast belting out all the tunes themselves, but raised the stakes further by having Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and company sing them live on set, without the benefit of perfect acoustics or endless takes in a recording studio. (The resulting performances are, shall we say, a mixed bag.)

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But ever since somewhere around the time Woody Allen studded his nostalgic 1996 romance "Everyone Says I Love You" with a bevy of decidedly unmusical A-listers, the movies have become a parade of less than triple- — or even double- — threat actors flaunting their show-tunes-loving sides. Sometimes it works – evidenced by the heady Oscar buzz for Anne Hathaway's going-for-broke performance in "Les Misérables," a role that basically boils down to one show-stopping "I Dreamed a Dream." But sometimes, right within the same film, well, Russell Crowe happens.

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The 22-year-old star of "The Hunger Games" came under some seriously BS criticism in certain circles last spring over whether her Katniss Everdeen was sufficiently emaciated-looking to be convincing. As Manohla Dargis complained in the New York Times, "A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission." The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy, meanwhile, duly noted her "lingering baby fat." 

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After cashing in her trademark long, dark locks for a short, platinum do on Sunday, Miley Cyrus has been expressing nothing but utter delight in her new look. She immediately changed her Twitter avatar to show off her dramatic, pixie-dream-girl look and declared she "never felt more me in my whole life" and that she's "feeling so happy in my skin."

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