Well, excuse him ... Martin can't pump life into a slow Oscar show

Blame Billy Crystal. This year the seven-time Academy Awards host excused himself from the job that has practically become a tenured position for him, leaving the emceeing chores up to Steve Martin. Crystal had set the gold standard for Oscar night - as Bob Hope and Johnny Carson did in generations past. Because of that, the academy apparently felt free to let the running time of the awards extend deeper and deeper into the night. Last year's Oscarcast was clocked at well over four hours. After all, if three hours of Billy is a gas, four hours of Billy is a riot. Not so with Martin, a comedian with impeccable taste and exquisite manners, whose specialty is telling screamingly funny self-mocking jokes. Even though it was his first time as host, Martin has presented the gold statuette eight times and is no stranger to live television, having been host of "Saturday Night Live" more times than anyone else. Yet by the halfway point of the 73rd annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, it was clear he could do nothing to keep the show's built-in bloat from overwhelming viewers. Crystal, somehow, knew how to pump life into the broadcast. Martin, for all his charm and comedic prowess, did not. He tried gamely. After being introduced by NASA astronauts in a video shot aboard their spacecraft, Martin joked, "By the way, that introduction cost the government 1 trillion dollars, so there goes your tax cut." Some jokes were not so innocent, as when Martin undressed Penelope Cruz with lines I don't even dare summarize here. You heard them. You wish you hadn't. But that's OK. Martin, who killed in another emcee gig last November - at the National Book Awards - is just getting started at the Oscars. Bring him back next year. Considering shows before the broadcast, ABC had the time to air Barbara Walters interviews with movie stars Ben Stiller and John Travolta as well as that noted movie legend Faith Hill. (Hill has starred in several short live-action features that you can see around the clock on Country Music Television.) At least Hill - with her slightly racy descriptions of how she and her superstar hubby Tim McGraw plan to keep the spark in their marriage - had something to say. The segment with Travolta felt more like a "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" piece, while Stiller followed in the tradition of David Letterman, Carson and other comics who are deadly in the interview box. With each passing year, Joan Rivers becomes increasingly irrelevant to Oscar night. For her special on cable's E! channel this year, she opened with a monologue in which she cracked one lame Hollywood joke after the next. She tried something fashionable - using the movie "Dude, Where's My Car?" as a punchline - but alas, poor Joan called it "Dude, Where Is My Car?" instead. This woman is the arbiter of what's up-to-date? "We are live," squawked Rivers, "which means anything can happen, but in my case, it rarely does." I couldn't have said it better. You can reach Aaron Barnhart through the TV Barn Web site at www.tvbarn.com. >>>