Crystal’S Replacement As Oscars Host Still At Large

However long the Academy Awards show runs next year, it just got longer with Billy Crystal’s announcement that he won’t be its host.

Crystal says he’ll be working on a movie until days before the March 25 telecast and will not have time to prepare for it. That leaves the show’s producers with a big spotlight and no one big enough to put in it.

In his seven stints as Oscar host, Crystal turned the role into a one-man show. Since 1990, there have been only two other hosts: Whoopi Goldberg three times, David Letterman once. Goldberg already has taken herself out of contention for next year, and after his 1995 performance, the academy is more apt to book Andrew Dice Clay than extend another offer to Letterman.

In a sense, the academy created its own monster in Crystal. Although Bob Hope was host or co-host of more than twice as many Oscar shows, he never became its star attraction, as Crystal has.

Until Hope showed up in 1940, the academy had chosen its hosts mostly from its own elite members; Cecil B. DeMille handled the chores in 1930, Lionel Barrymore in 1932 and Frank Capra in 1936 and 1939. But as the Oscars became a popular radio broadcast, then a TV show, the emcee’s role shifted from entertaining the live audience to entertaining the fans at home.

The host need not be a movie star, as Johnny Carson proved with a successful run in the early 1980s, but he has to be accepted as a member of the extended family to get away with insulting it.

Letterman was the ultimate outsider, a New York personality whose detached condescension caught the Hollywood crowd like an elbow to the ribs in Times Square.

Jay Leno, who does his show from L.A. and is an A-list party guest there, could get away with mocking the industry, and the academy wouldn’t worry about his embarrassing it with flights of tasteless fancy. That’s their chief concern with both Jim Carrey and Chris Rock, whose edgy, spontaneous comedy, they fear, might combust on live TV.

Robin Williams, who can seem to spontaneously combust without actually bursting into flame, is the ideal replacement for Crystal. But he has rejected the academy’s past entreaties and keeps a pretty busy movie schedule himself.