With Billy Crystal hosting, have the Oscars given up on youth?

The LAT’s Steve Zeitchik ponders the recent switch by the Academy Awards from Eddie Murphy [host] / Brett Ratner [producer] to Billy Crytal / Brian Grazer:

Yet all the hand-wringing over Crystal’s appeal suggests a different question: What if the Oscars chose the actor not in spite of his age but because of it? The common belief is that Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wants to freshen up the show to reel in young viewers. But the truth of it is that the Oscars have already tried a youth movement, and it hasn’t worked.

Back in 2006 and 2008, it tapped Jon Stewart, a paragon of campus comedy, to host the show. The move flopped: His 2006 reviewers were middling. And while they were better in 2008, the show drew the worst ratings (31.7 million total viewers) of the modern era. Whoever came because of Stewart was more than offset by those who tuned out.

Last year, the academy went with the youngest co-hosts in history in James Franco and Anne Hathaway (the latter of whom, incidentally, was 6 years old when Crystal hosted his first Oscars). The move backfired — ratings were tepid, their reviews were icebaths and the show gained attention mainly because Franco and writer Bruce Vilanch spent the next five months sniping at each other.

This year, of course, the Oscars hired Brett Ratner, who with the “Rush Hour” and “X-Men” franchises made movies the kids did come out to see. But It backfired in an even bigger way when Ratner went on Howard Stern to talk about his sexual habits. Sometimes when you go young, you wind up with juvenile.

I wonder, too, if the precipitous drop in young adult males at the box office could also have an impact on the Academy’s thinking.

For more of the LAT article, go here.

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