Oscars give Grammy regulars stage fright

LOS ANGELES — Sure, Melissa Etheridge is used to singing in front of thousands of people. It’s just that Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg aren’t usually in the audience, at least not all at once.

Etheridge, on hand to perform her Oscar-nominated song ‘‘I Need to Wake Up’’ from the documentary ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth,’’ admitted to no small amount of stage fright before tonight's Academy Awards show. She added that trying to avoid eye contact with her audience wouldn’t help either.

‘‘Then you go, ‘I’ll just look at the camera,’ and there’s a billion people out there,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a little crazy.’’

James Taylor, on hand for a duet with Randy Newman on the Oscar-nominated song ‘‘Our Town,’’ was taken aback when he arrived on the red carpet to the screams of fans in the bleachers.

‘‘It’s like another world,’’ he said, holding tightly to his wife Kim’s hand. ‘‘We’ll just concentrate on the music, do our best and try to enjoy the moment.’’

AP