I had an argument recently about the effects of watching a Saturday Night Live host visibly read the cue cards. I was arguing that it's distracting and sometimes seems to imply a lack of skill that undercuts anything good the performer is up to otherwise. My opponent countered that the whole point of SNL is the roughshod immediacy, and since the cue cards can change at any point from rehearsals to the taping, we should just accept it as part of the show's infrastructure. Maybe because the topic was already on my mind, I was completely blown away by Melissa McCarthy's performance this past weekend. It's kind of crazy that she was never a cast member, because she's a sketch prodigy. The second-time host's skills made watching sketches like "Million Dollar Wheel" — a basic throwaway — like an informative course in how to cram scripts into your being, into your soul, so that they still feel unpredictable and improvised. A mediocre bit dies between the time it takes to set up and when you first check to see how much longer it can possibly lie on the floor until production's janitor comes to carry it away on a stretcher. McCarthy never let that happen, because she never really allowed you to feel as though you knew what was going to come next.

The cold open kicked off with Bobby Moynihan as Kim Jong-un delivering two pieces of important news: First, the reopening of a nuclear complex that will leave North Korea's enemies "chagrined and discombobulated;" and, second, lifting a ban on same-sex marriage because "it is simply the right thing to do" (his eyes were opened by his gay nephew's weekly book discussion groups at his apartment — the nephew was executed anyway, but not because of that). Jong-un's open-mindedness isn't an indication that he's switched teams, however — so don't go thinking that! — because he's had relations with over 17 million women, whom he provided with their first orgasms ("this is not a joke. You can applaud"). Just as he trails off into his NCAA tournament pool, Dennis Rodman saunters in wearing polka-dot pants, fist-bumps him, and delivers your "Live from New York!" Remember when Rodman blew up a cold open in 1996? I didn't, but there he is, preserved in his boa. It wasn't my favorite cold open of all time, but it was good enough.

As her hit comedy Identity Thief continues to hold strong as the no. 1 movie of the year so far, and with The Heat, her buddy-cop movie with Sandra Bullock, poised to make her doubly powerful at the box office when it hits this summer, Melissa McCarthy is basically owning Hollywood in 2013. And she's showing no signs of stopping. Success begets success, after all, and it looks like she just nabbed her next big role: in St. Vincent de Van Nuys, opposite Bill Murray.

St. Vincent is a hotly anticipated project from writer/director Ted Melfi, produced by the Weinstein Company. The script made the celebrated Black List of Hollywood's top unproduced screenplays, and apparently McCarthy nabbed the role that "all the top comic actresses" were after.

Lizzy Caplan's spoofy commercial "Fashion Film" is like ASMR meets an Anthropologie catalogue. "Sometimes I think to myself in French, and listen to old records from the ’60s. They're way better than stuff today."

With 1,183 members, the actors branch is the largest single voting bloc of the Academy — and also the most susceptible to sentimentality. I don’t mean on-screen tearjerking (although God knows they go for that); I mean that more than any other branch, actors like to root around for the narrative beneath the nomination — the weary veteran finally getting his moment, the shiny-eyed newcomer who emerged out of nowhere, the funny guy who surprised everyone by being serious, the pretty actress who let herself be ugly. This should make for a grotesque and unfair roster of nominations, and sometimes it does, but happily, there are narratives available for any number of great performances. To wit:

Before we begin, it should be stipulated that awards shows are boring. They have always been boring, and they will continue to be boring until the Earth hurtles into the sun, which will almost certainly occur during the 18th hour of 10,464th Annual Academy Awards Psychocast, finally freeing us of the curious need to complain about why we aren't more entertained by famous people trading gold statues and listing their business obligations.

The fact that relatively non-famous person Charlie Day got to host SNL this weekend was surprising — even to Charlie Day. He kicked off his monologue with, “I know that Don Pardo just said it, but I think it’s important to confirm that I’m actually hosting Saturday Night Live. This is happening." In terms of pure comedy chops, Day — who has been an underrated manic force on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (and dare we say, one of the funniest people on TV) for seven seasons — was certainly qualified to host SNL. But the reason Day got the gig presumably had more to do with the fact he recently graduated to the big screen, with scene-stealing work in Going the Distance and Horrible Bosses. Still: Charlie’s not famous-famous, and SNL was probably only willing to accommodate a star of such low wattage because Day is (as we believe we’ve effectively communicated?) goddamn hilarious. So here’s the surprising part: Day’s episode was SNL’s highest-rated in over a month.