“The Birth of The Help” to the tune of “The Birth of the Blues”įate saw to it that Crystal wasn’t hosting when, say, Schindler’s List or 12 Years a Slave was up for awards. This year’s Academy Awards ceremony will have no host, but no one can take these four dozen–plus memories away: To be a true Crystal parody, the number has to make me simultaneously laugh and cringe I need to be thinking, Man, this is ostensibly funny and Oh, sweet Jesus, turn this off, I just can’t take it anymore! When the two sensations harmonize, that’s when we know it’s uncut Crystal. With five Best Picture nominees in eight of these years and nine in 2012, it all adds up to 49 shtick-heavy subroutines set to the music of Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, and more.Īnd I’ve ranked them all, using a closely held secret formula. Saturday Night, his 1992 directorial effort, is about a Borscht Belt comedian at the top of his game in 1956.) He began his Oscars hosting career not long after the premiere of 1989’s beloved When Harry Met Sally, emceeing the broadcasts in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997, 1998 (probably the zenith of the event), 2000, 2004, and (somewhat disastrously) in 2012. He’d bound onto the stage with an enormous grin and belt “Hooray for Howard’s End!” à la “Hooray for Hollywood.” It’s a format so stupid and so pure it can only be called brilliant.Ĭrystal, while technically young enough to have been part of the 1960s counterculture, is still more early-20th-century vaudevillian than anything else.
You probably have stuck in your head right now one of his numerous song-parody medleys, in which he would famously run down the plots of every year’s Best Picture nominees to the tune of standards from the Great American Songbook. Remember the Billy Crystal Oscars years? When the actor hosted the Academy Awards nine times from 1990 to 2012? Of course you do. The 2020 Academy Awards ceremony will have no host, but no one can take these 49 memories away.
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