BY MARY MCNAMARA

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES--

Poor Seth MacFarlane. Until Sunday night, hosting the Oscars must have seemed so easy. What did he have to do, really, to shine? Avoid inexplicable cross-dressing and increasingly slurred words a la James Franco, try not to pull a Ricky Gervais and openly offend half the nominees, and he'd be a hit. It's such an impossible task, hosting an awards show; the best you can hope for is not to bomb.

Then Tina Fey and Amy Poehler took the stage at this year's Golden Globes. Lovely, brilliant and utterly fearless, they made awards-show hosting an art form again, helming three hours of occasionally hilarious, occasionally emotional and surprisingly enjoyable TV.

The Golden Globes, man; who knew?

The show's opening dialogue had only one flaw--it had to end. Introducing the Globes as the only awards show in which "the beautiful people of film rub shoulders with the rat-faced people of TV," Poehler and Fey, both nominated for actress in a comedy or musical series, never stopped smiling even as they confused the acronym for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with a disease and, within the first few minutes of the show, brought audible gasps from the audience by effectively ending the controversy regarding "Zero Dark Thirty."

"I haven't paid much attention," Poehler said, "but when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron."

Poehler has the best deadpan in the business, wide-eyed and enthusiastic, responding only to the alternate universe occurring within her brain; Fey is a close second, somehow managing to project both oblivious security and hyper-alert insecurity with the same expression. "Anne Hathaway is here for her performance in 'Les Miserables,'" she said, adding that she "had not seen anyone as alone and abandoned since you were on stage with James Franco at the Oscars."

Fey also gave a shout-out to "Jennifer Lawrence, star of 'Silver Linings Playbook,' and Quentin Tarantino, the star of all my sexual nightmares," while Poehler announced that Meryl Streep, though nominated, was not present because "she has the flu. And I hear she's just fabulous in it."

Seriously, they could have done an hour set and everyone would have been happy. Not since Jimmy Fallon hosted the Emmys three years ago has an awards show been this much fun.