For those who love to sit in a darkened cinema and be taken to another place by a story told well, the event is a big American celebration of cinematic artistry and those who bring these stories to life.

For marketers and designers, it is one enormous promotional event, generating hundreds of millions of euro from tomorrow, just by their association with the current hot names in the business they call show.

The glamour of the perceived Hollywood lifestyle has seduced and fascinated millions of people around the world for decades.

Everyday in Los Angeles tens of thousands of tourists have their pictures taken beside the stars on the pavement on the Hollywood walk of fame, and then take bus tours to parts of the city which point out where stars live. Behind highly secure houses in most cases, with signs that say "Armed Response".

But still they come.

The Oscars ceremony has become the biggest fashion show on earth, where every second of the three-hour event has been haggled over, bought and paid for. It's not just about giving them the old razzle dazzle. The power of celebrity is at its peak, and designers and manufacturers are prepared to do whatever it takes to get their product on or even near to the stars.

Everybody, including the famous, likes getting things for nothing, and in the past five years or so, the gifts given to movie stars have become more and more extravagant and the giving of these gifts a virtual industry.

The audience which watches the Oscars is made up not only of those who love cinema, but also largely of those who follow celebrity culture closely.

Designers and manufacturers know this and calculate that three hours of exposure available during this annual event is the most valuable there is. It's a short leap of the imagination to consider how aggressively some of them pursue celebrity endorsement, just short of baring their teeth, given how the stars can just name their price for being seen in or near a given product.

"Actresses are just walking billboards for designers, " says author Bronwyn Cosgrave, who has just written a book on the history of fashion and the Oscars, due out next year.

"There's nothing new about celebrities endorsing things, but it's only since the 1990s that designers like Armani really realised they could push their fashion on what is really a spectacular TV show, and that their designs could become household names in minutes."

From about December each year, even before the Golden Globe nominations are made, publicists and stylists from various design house begin approaching the stylists of the various stars to try to persuade them to wear their designs or products. Not only will the stars be given the couture and jewellery for free, in almost all cases they will also be paid tens of thousands of dollars just for wearing said product.

Armani and Valentino are seen as the most proactive, directly approaching actors and presenters as soon as the nominations are made. Those who are not already linked to brands, unlike Nicole Kidman and Chanel or Angelina Jolie and St John, are directly targeted by the designers and their representatives.

"Celebrities are seen as discerning by the public, especially those who copy what they wear and do, but effectively what the stars are getting is an advertising fee, " says Cosgrave. "There is very little originality. Almost all of them have stylists and they are groomed to within an inch of their lives. It's all about a look. Nicole Kidman is styled from the tips of her dyed blonde hair down to her toes, even the way she stands. There is so little individuality, with the exceptions of the few like Gwyneth Paltrow and Sophia Copolla, who don't have stylists."

In the past few years, the phenomenon of "gifting lounges" has emerged in Los Angeles, where for several weeks prior to the Oscars, celebrities and their stylists are brought to luxurious locations across the city, euphemistically called "retreats", where they are invited to take their pick from a mind-boggling array of gifts. These range from clothing, to plastic surgery, cars, dishwashers, diamonds, electronic goods and sex toys. You name it, it's there for the taking, quite literally. And not only that, the stars are in many cases paid for taking the gifts for free.

It gets even more surreal. The organisers of these swag fests also charge the companies who want to be included in the suites and baskets up to $20,000 each just to be included.

And they pay it. Willingly.

"The hard part was six or seven years ago, convincing companies to give their products away for free and pay us for the privilege of doing so, " said Lash Fary one of the first people to begin the gift lounge concept at the Grammy's four years ago. "Today, they vie for the opportunity to be included."

At the Golden Globes last month, Gwyneth Paltrow at least had the grace to express surprise that her gift basket included a cruise to Antarctica and Tasmania, value to $22,000.

Many of the other stars, like Halle Berry, who incidentally went home from Sundance last month with a brand new washer-drier, act like they expect it and it's their due.

Other 'gifting experiences' as they're called, are even more immediate and direct.

At the Screen Actors Guild award in January, winners and presenters went directly from their televised moment on the podium to a backstage 'gifting retreat'. At the Emmys, it was the same story.

"When it comes to the Oscars, money is no object, " says journalist Susan Hornik, who has covered the red carpet in LA for 15 years.

"It's gotten more extreme in the past five years, as the designers fall over themselves to get to the stars and, to be honest, most of the stars will take anything, once it's free."

Many people lament how difficult it is for a small or unknown designer to penetrate this world unless they have some connection or a great stroke of luck.

The media and public embrace of celebrity culture appears total.

"The power of celebrity is just enormous.

Designers get profile by association with them and the established designers aggressively defend this. Even models are having difficulty getting on to the covers of magazines, " says Kate Noubelis of Backstage Creations. "Market research has shown that more magazines sell with a picture of a celebrity on the cover than that of a model.

Even the era of the supermodel has been supplanted by celebrity worship."

I visited several of these retreats in the runup to tonight's ceremony to see what it must be like. There was a seductive bordello-like ambience in the softly lit Diamond Lounge, where a barman was mixing mojitos, a DJ was mixing music and an array of lingerie, beauty products, handbags, a five-night trip to a spa in Bora Bora, diamonds and even chandeliers were on offer to the invited stars and their entourages.

I felt like the proverbial kid in the candy store and considered trying to persuade them of my 'celebrity' status in Ireland and how everyone copies everything I do. I had a mojito instead and some "fat-free" water.

There are eight gifting lounges in LA and it's estimated that each of them gives gift baskets estimated to be worth in the region of $30,000 to each of the stars, on top of paying them to wear some of what they have been gifted. (Incidentally, you'd want a JCB to lift some of these baskets. ) "You could say it's a gamble, but the added value of a star wearing a famous label is unbelievable, " says Shelli Ann Couch who runs Backstage Creations which hosts one of these suites for the Golden Globes. "Even if the star doesn't wear or keep an item, but gives it to one of their entourage, the designers reckon it's worth it as they see these as the kinds of people they want wearing their stuff because of their proximity to the stars."

Gibsons is a famous shop near Melrose Place, not because celebrities shop there, but because it watches very closely what stars are wearing or using, from key chains to clothes and almost instantly stocks the same thing, highly marked up. It's a shop beloved of those in LA who diet almost exclusively on the lifestyles and trends of the famous.

"Maybe Los Angeles is a bit of an aberration, " says Flores Rembrandt who runs another gifting suite, Platinum Events. "In many places celebrity styles tend to dictate what other people do and wear and it's mostly just teens who follow these obsessively. But here in LA you'll have 55-year-old men who watch styles and trends of the stars just as closely and ape whatever they see as the thing to be doing/wearing/owning. Gibson's is cashing in wholesale on this."

One exception to this is Colin Farrell's recent "rest" from his spot of reported exhaustion, which is, amusingly, tut-tutted at here.

So you thought it was all about entertainment and the movies? Even movies themselves have become tools for the marketing people. Product placement in movies has become intense and deadly serious, ever since it was first done in ironic tones in The Truman Show. Seminars are now held frequently in LA on how to get your products placed or mentioned in movies. There is no escaping the corporatisation of culture and entertainment. We are being sold to at every turn whether we knowingly elect to buy or not.

The Academy Awards organisers spend about $10m on the production of the show.

ABC, which broadcasts it, makes an estimated $75m from advertising during the show, half of which goes back to the Academy of Motion Pictures. It's not called showbusiness for no reason.

On top of the gifts which the stars get from the various gifting suites, there is also the official Oscar basket, which is valued somewhere in the region of $250,000, and it's been a few years since anyone has physically been able to lift one of them. It began in 1989 as a way of thanking the actors for presenting the awards, but is now a marketing juggernaut of its own, nearly vying with the event itself.

The Academy refused to divulge what its gift basket contains, mindful perhaps of the naked marketing overshadowing what the event is supposed to be all about; ie, honouring remarkable movies and those who made them.

Even the little statuette of Oscar has been in the news, one having recently been sold for up to $1.5m, and the trade in vintage Oscars is reportedly brisk.

To try to prevent this eventuality of stars hitting hard times and selling their Oscars, the Academy brought in a signed agreement preventing them from selling the statues without first offering them back for $10.

But there is very little they can do about it.

Orson Welles sold his Oscar in the years after he was destroyed by William Randolph Hearst for the making of Citizen Kane.

The magician David Copperfield recently paid a quarter of a million dollars for the Oscar awarded to Michael Curtiz as director of Casablanca. In 1999, Michael Jackson paid $1.54m for an Oscar for Gone With the Wind.

Steven Spielberg and actor-producer Kevin Spacey have jumped into the fray by digging into their wallets to rescue Oscars at public auction. Spielberg paid $607,500 for Clark Gable's 1934 Oscar, for It Happened One Night; $578,000 for Bette Davis's 1938 Oscar for Jezebel; and $207,500 for Davis's 1935 Oscar for Dangerous.

Needy heirs who own a statuette don't always have the luxury to debate the pros and cons of selling it. Survival trumps sentiment.

At a pre Oscar's lunch at the Kodak theatre last month, the nominees were told that "80% of you will go home losers from the Oscars". This remark is redolent of a more innocent time, when to be nominated by your peers in the Academy for your talent and work in the motion picture industry was what it was all about.

Now the power and value of celebrity is such that to just get there is enough to make you one of the winners of life's lottery and that the bling bling will keep coming.

They will all show up on the red carpet tonight looking as though they are going to the swellest party on earth, but with the exception of those who've made it, this night is work too.

Nice work, if you can get it.