ROY CHRISTOPHER / PRODUCTION DESIGNER

Will any of the winners on stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion tonight thank Roy Christopher? They should. Without him, there wouldn’t be a stage. Christopher, 55, is the production designer of the Academy Awards show for a record 12th time. If that’s not enough, he also does the Emmys (where he’s won five awards) and Tonys, as well as the sitcoms “Frasier” and “Becker.”

MILLENNIAL: “This is the last Oscars show of the century--but then it’s the last everything of the century. [Producer] Gil Cates wanted to convey a respect for the past of motion pictures and the academy, but with an important look to the future. I did enough rough sketches to design it for the next 100 years.”

THE WINNER IS . . . : “I came upon a 16th century Italian engraving that showed a fanciful rotunda dome, with the artist looking beyond it to the sky--so powerful and elegant--and wondered if it was possible to interpret it in a contemporary way. So the set will be a giant rotunda, like the audience is looking up to the sky or whatever we project on it.”

MOOD RING: “The look of the show is sometimes subliminally affected by the movies out in the year. Gil didn’t say, ‘Gee, we’re going to have war movies and Elizabethan movies,’ but when you see ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and ‘Elizabeth,’ something permeates--elegance. The ‘Schindler’s List’ year, we all had a sense of purpose, and the set was more simple.”

STAR-STRUCK: “When I first did this 20 years ago, stars like Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier would all come down to rehearsals and hang out. Meeting Audrey Hepburn was probably as big a thrill to me as anything. And a couple of years ago, Madonna--all of a sudden I’m sitting across a table from her talking about her number.”

PIZAZZ: “I saw one MTV awards show where they had a fishbowl as the podium. We could never do that. We love humor and wit, but that has to come from the people. The setting needs to be elegant--though we flew Shirley MacLaine in once on a spaceship and gave Cher an entrance where it looked like she was coming out of a Bob Mackie headdress.”

FUTURAMA: “We always talk about doing virtual reality stuff--walking the host through a virtual set and then bring her on to the real stage. But this show, since we have an audience we want to entertain in the theater, we want to give them as the real thing as much as possible. I hope 20 years from now they don’t just do it all in front of a blue screen.”