Billy's back, refreshed and ready to host the Oscars

Oh, he had to be asked to take the job. But he's been asked pretty much every year since he first hosted the Academy Awards in 1990. This year — four years since he last hosted — Crystal returns for an eighth time.

"I feel refreshed. I feel like I'm anxious to be up there," he said. "And that's what makes me want to do it. The years I haven't done it, I just didn't feel like I wanted to. And I don't think you should do anything if you just feel like you don't want to do it."

Crystal said he felt "itchy" to do the show during last year's telecast (although he thought Steve Martin did a "magnificent" job.) "The war had hit, and I wanted to be in the limelight. This was an edgy challenge. I wanted that extra pressure, because I thought it was extraordinary times — an awards show in the middle of all this."

Not that there's ever a time when he hasn't felt pressure hosting the Oscars, which he's done in 1990, '91, '92, '93, '97, '98 and 2000. "It's incredibly nerve-wracking because . . . the world is a rough room," Crystal said. "A billion people are watching you, and to keep the balance of the evening moving, hopefully be witty, hopefully be spontaneous if something happens and get out of the way of the show after a while, it's a big job and a hard one."

And doing the job well — polls indicate he's the most popular choice to host the show — adds even more pressure. "If you've done it well, there's pressure to do it better. And we've set the bar pretty high on this show," Crystal said.

If the host of the Oscar-cast is hardly a novice, the producer is. Oh, Joe Roth has plenty of show-biz experience — he's been a movie producer, a director and a studio chief (of both Fox and Disney) — but he's never produced anything for television before. "When Frank Pierson, the president of the Academy, came to me and asked me to do it, I actually thought he had the wrong person for a minute," Roth said.

And, speaking to the Academy's Board of Governors for the first time, he said, "When you watch the first minute of the show, just remember that's the first minute of live television, or any television, I've ever produced," he said with a laugh. "And there's a bunch of elderly people turning up their hearing aids, going, 'What? Is that possibly true?'

"All the people who came to me and said I was crazy for producing it asked me who the host was. I said, 'Billy.' They went, 'Oh, OK.' "

Crystal certainly doesn't seem worried. He said he had a "really good working relationship" with the Oscars producer when Roth directed him in "America's Sweethearts." And the two seem very much in sync about what they're hoping to do on Sunday night — make the awards ceremony be more of a "party" that "embraces . . . all of the good movies, not just the ones nominated," Crystal said.

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