FRANCO: IT WAS ANNE HATHAWAY’S FAULT

James Franco has repeatedly denied that he was stoned when he co-hosted the Academy Awards show in February, and in a pretaped interview set to air tonight (Friday) on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, he gives his own theory about why everyone assumes he was. “Because — I love her, but Anne Hathaway is so energetic, I think the Tasmanian Devil would look stoned standing next to Anne Hathaway.” Franco was clearly miffed at the public reaction to his hosting skills. “Here’s the hypocritical thing,” he tells Letterman. “Leading up to the Oscars, I couldn’t hear enough about how, ‘Oh, people don’t care about the Oscars anymore, it’s dead, it’s boring, it’s at the end of a long awards season, who cares about it?’ Well, as soon as you don’t host the way they want you to, they suddenly care and they won’t shut up about it.” Letterman, who also was derided for his performance as host of the Oscars in 1995, commiserated. The experience, he said, “was horrible…I was so bad that they talked for a while about shutting down the motion picture industry.”