Remember that brief March 1 New York Post “Page Six” item? Here’s a quick refresher:

Jimmy Kimmel is already being lined up to host next year’s Oscars, we’re told. One source said, “Jimmy is favored to host the Oscars next year; ABC has been pushing him for the role.” The late-night host already seems a shoo-in for the job after he earned his best post-awards show ratings on Sunday night.

We’ve been saying for several years that the logical host for the annual ABC-TV telecast is the one within walking-commute distance. Now that Seth MacFarlane has confirmed what pretty much everyone in Hollywood already knew, it’s hopefully only a matter of very little time before Kimmel finally gets his outside-the-special-box shot.

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Recent LA Weekly intern Brittany Taylor has gifted her Culver City mentors with a really fun little item today: a Q&A with UCLA film school student Nicolas Crucio about what it was like to take James Franco‘s first-semester screenwriting class.

Taylor, also a UCLA student, ended her stint with LA Weekly in January. Franco’s multi-multi-hyphenate reputation now precedes him everywhere; here, it definitely seems like the failed Oscar host and successful-everything-else artiste did not disappoint. From Crucio’s answer when asked what the class was about:

“It’s definitely very experimental and a few people were weirded out by this. [...] The experimental part is we film on two cameras the whole class and the readings. We’ll film the feedback James gives us, the discussions of the readings and movies of the week.

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Apparently, there is going to be a lot of sex on-screen as well as off this year at Sundance. At least that’s the Day One decoupage offered by Movie City News head honcho David Poland.

In setting the salacious scene, Poland pays a certain male A-lister the ultimate backhanded compliment (the bolding is ours):

We’ve already seen Gaby Hoffman running around buck naked – and not highly sexualized – in the title role of Crystal Fairy. But just wait til they get a load of dick. James Franco is the finger in the ass of Sundance this year, with two strong pieces.

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This week’s episode of Allison Hope Weiner’s Lip.tv interview program Media Mayhem is fantastically entertaining. The guest is David Wild, who got a job straight out of college with Esquire magazine, moved on from there to a staff position with Rolling Stone before winding up (with a little help from Steven Spielberg) as a go-to guy for the Emmys, Grammys and various other awards show/celebrity tributes.

One of Wild’s Oscar writing brushes was the year that James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-hosted. Weiner asks Wild for his thoughts on why it went so wrong:

“I cannot explain it other than I felt like it was the worst blind date in show business history. It was the homecoming queen or head of drama club trying hard in the sweetest possible to put on a show, and a guy who for whatever reason I don’t think wanted to host the show. In fact he went on Jimmy Kimmel and announced his intention to be the worst host in Oscar history. So on a certain level, the show was a tremendous success, because he achieved that goal.”

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With cynics predicting an Academy Awards snooze fest this year thanks to The Artist‘s inexorable march towards Best Picture, Best Actor and more, hints of a different kind of entertainment have been dropped in the New York Times.

According to reporter Michael Cieply‘s sources, more change was afoot last year following the disastrous James Franco-Anne Hathaway program. And that perhaps, if the production process had not been thrown into a tizzy by the departure of Brett Ratner and Eddie Murphy, there might have been a more radical flavor embraced than the one currently being rehearsed behind closed doors:

One line of thinking, according to people who were briefed on the discussions but insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the Academy, proposed throwing the Oscar process wide open to a public that has been trained by American Idol, TMZ and an endless feed of Internet moments to expect some grit with their glamor. Among the suggestions: nominees using smartphones to photograph themselves in the run-up to the show.

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As might be expected, the Ratner-Murphy-Grazer-Crystal game of Oscar musical chairs is echoing across Madison Avenue. According to Claire Atkinson of the New York Post, brand new AMPAS marketing chief Christina Kounelias (pictured) and her colleagues are scrambling to adjust an ad sales pitch that until recent events at the Arclight and on Howard Stern airwaves, was predicated entirely on Axel Foley.

One of the problems the Oscar marketing gang faces is that the selection of a 63-year-old, traditional format replacement host leaves them challenged to explain how they will fix what happened last year. Despite the presence of a tweeting James Franco and giggling Anne Hathaway, the 2010 Oscars broadcast was a disaster:

Horizon Media researcher Brad Adgate noted that the Oscars broadcast actually aged upwards last year with the median age hitting 50.6 years — the oldest it’s ever been.

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Leave it to actor James Franco to pick April Fool’s Day as the perfect date for some Academy Awards related spring cleaning.

Per the Hollywood Reporter‘s Mark Cina, he is off Twitter, just a couple of months after creating an account to lead up to the 83rd Oscars telecast. And tonight on Letterman, he deflects all those viewer comments that he must have been high on the 27th of February, suggesting that even the Tasmanian Devil would look “stoned” next to the energizer bunny aura of co-host Anne Hathaway:

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The 83rd annual Academy Awards may have blown harder than the Santa Ana’s, but that golden statuette still holds a powerful glow when removed from the stench of a James Franco let down by Bruce Vilanch.

In a great little piece in Delaware’s Dover Post, we learn that Live Action Short winner Luke Matheny (God of Love, pictured) was treated like royalty when he returned on March 14th to his Alma Mater Concord High School. There to welcome him were teachers, neighbors, students, journalists, a 10-foot replica of the Oscar, and… state Governor Jack Markell.

In honor of his hometown pride and willingness to give Delaware a “shout-out,” during his acceptance speech at the Oscars and in God of Love, Markell named Matheny “Delaware’s Ambassador to Hollywood.”

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San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub has posted a tongue-in-cheek apology for the part he played in helping feed local hysteria over the possibility of a weekend Bay Area snowstorm that failed to materialize.

Hartlaub points to his February 17th and February 23rd historical photo galleries shared on the site as culprits #1 and #2, and his Twitter feed as culprit #3. Admirably, he says thought it would be easy to do so, he is not interested in shirking responsibility:

It’s easy to pretend like the snow hype never happened with things like Charlie Sheen‘s meltdown and the James Franco‘s Academy Awards hosting disaster (my theory: instead of being too stoned, his poor performance was a product of not being stoned enough) causing new distractions. But I know sins of overhype were committed in the past two weeks, and this time I’m not going to let it pass.

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Haha. Newsweek convened one of those Oscar-time actors roundtables and got a funny moment out of Oscar host-to-be James Franco. To the question: “Is there a secret to landing a really good onscreen kiss?” Franco responded, “Anyone who’s ever made a home sex tape knows, what feels best isn’t always what looks best.”

Duly noted, sir.