As we all know, James Cameron is a rollicking, fun-loving guy. In completely unrelated news, Sacha Baron Cohen has been dropped from the roster of presenters at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony — mostly because the show’s producers feared the wrath of Cameron. Supposedly Cohen planned to appear as a female Nav’i, making “her” presentation in the jawbreaking Nav’i dialect with a translator at hand (Ben Stiller). As the speech went on, the Nav’i would become visibly more irritated with Stiller’s translation, and finally rip open her evening gown to reveal that she was pregnant and storm off the stage to accuse Cameron of being the baby-daddy. Somehow, producer Bill Mechanic (who was head of Twentieth Century Fox when Cameron made Titanic) didn’t think Cameron would respond to this gag as well as, say, Eminem:

Let’s just say that Cameron isn’t known to be, shall we say, “self-deprecating,” explained one insider familiar with the decision to cut the sketch.

Too bad, really. It might have been kind of funny. Particularly if Sigourney Weaver clomped onstage in some kind of power-suit and snarled, “Get away from him, you bitch,” and got into a hugely violent catfight with the Nav’i. I don’t know why people never ask my advice when they’re planning these things.