Billy Crystal, Oscars: Reviews

Billy Crystal returned to host the 84th Academy Awards.

Eddie Murphy was initially slated to act as host, but dropped out.

BILLY CRYSTAL is helping put a fairytale ending on an ugly Academy Awards drama by returning to host the famed ceremony in backdraft of Eddie Murphy’s departure.

Crystal, widely considered the best host of the last decade, maybe longer, was called in to fill the slot left vacant when Murphy followed his producing partner Brett Ratner out the door.

“Some of the best moments of my career have happened on the Oscar stage,” Crystal said in a statement. “I am thrilled to be back there. Actually, I am doing this so that the young woman in my pharmacy will stop asking me my name when I pick up my perscriptions.”

Billy Crystal is getting mixed reviews. Some are positive, though not overly enthusiastic. The show overall, however, is getting a lot of negative response.

Here are a few:

USA Today: Billy Crystal's return: He was fine, but lacked sparkle

You can seldom go wrong by bringing back the best.

Even if he wasn't exactly at his best.

To be fair to Billy Crystal, who returned to the Academy Awards Sunday night for his ninth stint as host and his first since 2004, his show-opening routine was being held to an awfully high standard — as in, the one he's set for himself over the years. Odds are most people were more excited to see Crystal insert himself into the nominated films, his long-time signature bit, than they were to see the films themselves.

Those are high expectations to meet, and Crystal didn't quite meet them. You may have smiled much of the way, but with Crystal we're used to laughing from beginning to end.

...Things picked up when Crystal moved on to his other Oscar signature: the medley, dedicated to the nine best-picture nominees. Once again, it wasn't his strongest bit ever — though perhaps the jokes, as in his spoof of The Descendants, would have landed better if one had been able to make out the lyrics. But it was a reminder of how comfortable he seems in the job, and how comfortable the audience seems to be with him.

If that strikes you as unimportant, compare that to last year's hosting performance by Anne Hathaway— who was sweet, but seemed unsure of what she was doing — and James Franco, less sweet and unsure of where he was.

Give me Crystal, even a second-level Crystal, anytime.

New York Daily News: 2012 Oscars host Billy Crystal shines in return to Academy Awards stage

Pinch-hitter Billy Crystal made a good case Sunday night for reclaiming his old full-time gig hosting the Academy Awards.

Hosting his ninth Oscars, but his first in eight years, Crystal recaptured smartly the formula that worked for him in the past: a quick-hit opening montage, a song-and-dance number, then a sprinkling of jokes that had an edge but never drew blood.

It wasn’t the kind of performance that had millions of thumbs hovering over the Twitter buttons all night — that was Ricky Gervais back on the Golden Globes, silly — but it kept the show percolating, kept the focus on the movies and served up a few laughs in a show that at times felt longer than the Republican primary season.

...Crystal had a few jokes that didn’t score, like a painful segment where he pretended to read minds.

His batting average held up, however, thanks to solid hits like the song-and-dance opening. It isn’t great singing, but it remains great fun, and someday he and Neil Patrick Harris really must have a host-off.

Crystal fell into this one by accident. Eddie Murphy resigned when his friend Brett Ratner got fired as producer for making some undiplomatic remarks, and Crystal agreed to come out of retirement to fill in.

It proved to be a good pickup.

New York Times: Even the Jokes Have Wrinkles

Out with the new.

Back with the old.

...The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally, starting with an introduction by Morgan Freeman, who was followed by Billy Crystal, returning to host his ninth Oscar ceremony. And age was his theme of the night. He did his usual comic medley of movie moments, including a sketch with George Clooney in “The Descendants,” urging Mr. Crystal to host the show. He promised “the youngest, hippest writers in town” and the camera panned to a group of drooping, old white men from the film “Moneyball.”

And those may well have been the writers. When Octavia Spencer won a best supporting actress Oscar for playing a maid in “The Help,” Mr. Crystal joked that after he saw the movie, he was so moved he wanted to hug the first black woman he saw, adding, “which in Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” It was a line that could have been used back when Hattie McDaniel, the first black actress to be honored with an Academy Award, won for playing a maid in “Gone With the Wind.”

It all looked very familiar, which is perhaps necessary when so few of the nominated films are. The Academy Awards are about competition, but it’s less about winners and losers than it is about the ceremony’s struggle to stay on top in a television landscape cluttered with award shows.

Los Angeles Times: ACADEMY AWARDS

The night kicked off with Billy Crystal returning as host for the ninth time after far too long an absence.

Crystal hasn’t hosted since 2004 — and he wasn’t supposed to host this year. It was supposed to be Eddie Murphy. But Murphy quit, following producer-director Brett Ratner out the door. Ratner had been tapped to produce the Oscars along with Don Mischer but Ratner was ousted after he used a gay slur.

The show opener played off this riff, starting with a mock torture scene in which Crystal was forced to take on the role as host. That catapulted him into scenes from some of the top nominated movies of the year — and a lip lock with George Clooney and a chance meeting with Tom Cruise. That followed with a song-and-dance medley poking gentle fun of all the best picture nominees — as well as a jab at the show itself: Nothing takes the sting out of these tough economic times like watching a bunch of millionaires giving golden statues to each other, he said.

Only one other person has hosted Hollywood's biggest night more time than Crystal — Bob Hope. Hope did it 18 times, so Crystal has a ways to go to break that record.

The Wrap: Billy Crystal in Blackface at Oscars: Whaaaa?

Raise your hand if you expected a blackface controversy at this year's Oscars.

Host Billy Crystal's opening montage featured the bizarre inclusion of his Sammy Davis Jr. character during a "Midnight in Paris" tribute that also featured Justin Bieber. Bieber announced that he was going back in time to hang out with Hemingway -- like the mysterious characters who pick up Owen Wilson's character in "Paris."

"And then we're gonna go kill Hitler," added Crystal-as-Davis, pulling a switchblade.

The moment got a huge laugh. But Davis' inclusion made not a lot of sense since:

1. Davis died two decades ago

2. Davis was a child in the 1920s.

Oh, right, and 3: No one really does blackface anymore. Crystal did it when he played Davis on "Saturday Night Live" in the '80s, but what somehow airs on a late night show nearly three decades ago doesn't necessarily fly during on of the most-watched shows of the year.

Tweeters were fairly unanimous in responding: "Whaaaa?"

Washington Post: TV review: Oscar’s wishful thinking

Buoyed by a nostalgic notion that a silent movie is totally where it’s at, Sunday night’s 84th annual Academy Awards telecast on ABC turned into a dull exercise in the ol’ Hollywood self-salute, a sentimental journey, as if the industry was performing CPR on a business model that is vanishing before everyone’s eyes.

Billy Crystal, hosting his ninth Oscar show (his first was in 1990, his most recent was in 2004), seemed to be overseeing a cruise ship dinner show designed to appeal to the over-50 travel club. Early on, it hit the rocks and started to list. Almost everyone drowned.

...The 63-year-old Crystal was full of perfectly palatable jokes during the show, the kind you smirk at more than actually laugh. “We’re here in the beautiful Chapter 11 Theater,” Crystal said, the first of many gags about Eastman Kodak’s bankruptcy proceedings, which led to the abrupt stripping of the branded name on the theater where the Oscar ceremony has been held for a decade.

Broke and desperate? How 99 percent. “Nothing can take the sting out of economic crisis like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues,” Crystal joked. He pulled out a lot of ba-da-dum gags that at least (the very least) had the appeal of seeming familiar as comfy slippers: There was the opening montage inserting the host into some of the year’s more memorable movie scenes (Justin Bieber and Crystal’s Sammy Davis Jr. in a 1920s “Midnight in Paris” bit, for example — “We’re going to go kill Hitler!” Sammy effused). Crystal followed that with one of those Gridiron-style musical medleys where the plots of current films are set to old show tunes and standards.

This nursing home feeling was all very apt, from the opening moment when actor Morgan Freeman came out and announced that show would “celebrate the present and look back on the [film industry’s] glorious past.”

...Sadistic though it may be, watching the Academy Awards anymore is about partaking in that national ur-angst about finding the perfect Oscar host. Lordy, we just won’t ever find him or her, will we?

The Hollywood Reporter: Oscars Become Badly Paced Bore-fest

Because it’s important to get this out of the way, both presenting and hosting the Oscars are hard work. Thankless, even. For proof, let me put together a montage from the 84th Annual Academy Awards.

Perhaps this is just another thing to blame Brett Ratner for, since his mouth cost him the gig and Eddie Murphy went with him, forcing the Academy to make the safe choice of calling on Billy Crystal to host for the ninth time.

And somewhere, against all odds, James Franco is buying drinks for everybody. The colossal hosting disaster from last year is now forgotten by the safe, unfunny, retro-disaster that was Crystal making jokes that he laughed at repeatedly and overseeing an Oscars telecast that was as poorly paced as any in recent memory.

While it’s true that the Oscar host gets too much blame when it goes wrong, there was nary a comedic bit from Crystal that didn’t seem like it came from the prior decade or was as obvious as a crying baby in church. If the Academy wanted safe, it got safe, but it also got what seemed like a lounge act that was entirely too chummy and self-satisfied.

But Crystal is just the rod with nowhere to run in a lightning storm. More blame should be placed on the direction of the show, which started deathly slow (after the predictable and no longer fresh or creative video spoof from Crystal) and then got shockingly more slow as it went along.

...Just a guess here – but since this makes two fairly horrendous Oscars in a row, the Academy will have to really rethink the process next year. And not to guess about others' feelings, but you can bet that other critics will revile this effort as well.

For all of this talk about how the movies are magic (montage, montage, montage), maybe someone in the business could have sprinkled some of that magic on this telecast. It certainly didn’t transport us to another world – unless that world was a show on another channel.

I can't think of any host who would have made last night's proceedings truly entertaining.

How many times in the course of the telecast did we have to see a shot of George Clooney? Apparently, he's the new Jack Nicholson of awards shows. Yeah, keep showing George react - smile, laugh, smirk.

Of course that's boring.

I think Crystal summed up at least part the problem when he said, "Nothing can take the sting out of economic crisis like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues."

That's no joke.

It's not entertaining to watch these pampered, self-proclaimed artistes parade their egos.

The awards show format, the entire concept, seems antiquated.

The question isn't who can save it or how?

The question comes down to this: Why bother?