Tonight's Academy Awards will see Hollywood in celebrity overdrive. Even in recession, the Oscars pump over $130m into the local economy. Suites at the Four Seasons and the Beverly Wilshire have been snapped up at $5,000 a night, similarly rooms at the iconic Château Marmont. The House of Valentino estimates that its media exposure on the red carpet is worth $25m. Even Laurel & Hardy impersonators schmoozing tourists outside the Chinese Theatre reckon to pocket $50 an hour during Oscar week.
From two o'clock this morning Los Angeles Police Department workers have been cordoning off Hollywood Boulevard and putting up concrete barriers for a security zone around the Kodak Theatre. Early Sunday walkers passing along the Walk of Fame pavement studded with pink coral stars and famous names will find themselves on a vast empty studio set.
Later in the afternoon, floodlights will incongruously enhance the daylight with criss-crossing beams as limousines pull up and begin disgorging designer-clad stars onto the red carpet, fodder for fawning TV reporters.
The rituals are like Groundhog Day in their déjà vu predictability. Apart from the venue, all that's really changed since the inaugural Oscars at the Roosevelt Hotel in 1929 are the titles of the movies. One year's winners are another year's presenters. It's like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic except that Hollywood shows no signs of sinking, despite a global crisis that has left the city of Los Angeles with a deficit of $500m.
The Oscars are first and foremost a television spectacle. Their purpose is to raise money for the Motion Picture Academy. The ceremony costs around $30m – the gold statuettes are $500 apiece – but television fees of over $70m leave a tidy profit.
Over a billion viewers each year are hooked, not just on the awards but on the glitz of competing pre-parties and post-parties, the biggest of which are the Governors Ball and the Vanity Fair bash. Even the nominees are no more that bit players in what has become a global reality show.
I remember sitting in my hired tuxedo and humble rented red Pinto, jammed in a line of black-windowed limousines waiting to get off the freeway to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the 1976 Oscars. As I reached the red carpet, valets rushed forward to open my door and collect my keys, leaving me free to walk the gamut of cameras and cheering onlookers who assumed I must be somebody. Not wanting to disappoint, I waved, raising even more cheers.
All the guests and nominees were marshalled to allotted seats where we waited obediently for over an hour while floor managers bossed everyone around. As a first-timer, I couldn't but marvel at the outrageous pretence of it all. The ceremony was designed to be watched on screen rather than experienced live: each of us even had an individual monitor on which we could check what the TV audience was seeing. As the show progressed it became more entertaining to watch the screen than the stage. Nominees and presenters alike were unceremoniously ushered on and off and Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, eventual winners of the major acting awards for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, meekly sought their chalk marks.
It's always disillusioning to see how a magician does his tricks.
That didn't stop Fletcher achieving a heart-wrenching moment when she dedicated her Oscar to her deaf, mute parents who were watching at home. "I thank you for teaching me to have a dream," she said, her voice faltering as she gesticulated in sign language. "You are seeing my dream come true."
That morning I had shared breakfast of champagne and croissants with Milos Forman, the exiled Czech director of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. All that mattered to him was that his two sons had finally been allowed out of Czechoslovakia to join him. "Nothing else is real," he said.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from the Ken Kesey cult novel set in a mental asylum, perhaps a metaphor for western society, was the second movie he made in the States after being stranded there following the overthrow of the liberal Dubcek government in 1968. It was more emphatic than Taking Off, his intriguingly ambivalent 1971 satire of middle-class New York generation-gap neuroses. "I didn't appreciate then how much Americans like movies to have endings. They don't like to be left in doubt."
He was gloomy about his Oscar prospects. "I've been here twice before with best foreign picture nominations. When I came I was told I wouldn't win. And yet in spite of this there was a tiny little space in my mind that believed there might be a miracle."
He looked out morosely on the early morning Willshire Boulevard traffic. "Now it's the same in reverse," he said. "Everybody is telling me I'm going to win. But there's a tiny little space in my mind that is filled with doubt."
Which goes to show that if you've been wrong before you're likely to be wrong again. Not only did Forman win best director, but his young producer Michael Douglas – whose father Kirk Douglas had optioned the book 15 years before for $15,000 and gave it to him because he couldn't do anything with it – collected the best picture Oscar, the first time since It Happened One Night in 1934 that the same picture won all four major awards.
Apart from never having been in Los Angeles before, this was also my first time in the States. I'd been covering an official St Patrick's Day visit to Washington by then taoiseach Liam Cosgrave and Garret FitzGerald. By chance I found myself sitting beside Zsa Zsa Gabor at a concert hosted by President Ford in the White House. We chatted about the Oscars coming up the following week. "You must go," she said.
It was too late to get press accreditation but back in Dublin Harry Band, who ran United Artists and could sell a fridge to an eskimo, managed to get me a studio invitation. Aer Lingus helped book a room at Château Marmont. Hearing I was coming, John Boorman phoned to say he was tied up in post-production on The Heretic, and would I be free to be his wife Cristal's escort to some parties.
Without realising it I had gatecrashed the Oscars, slipping behind their public face, away from the cameras, an accepted listener.
So there I was, waking up from a deep sleep in my room in the spookily gothic Château Marmont, one-time haunt of Greta Garbo. In later years John Belushi would die in one of its bungalows and photographer Helmut Newton would meet his end in the driveway, not to mention Colin Farrell holding wild non-stop parties for friends from Dublin.
The phone rang loudly. It was five o'clock. I couldn't think who would ring so early in the morning. Cristal wanted to know when I was going to pick her up for a party. "It's only 5am," I said. "In the afternoon," she added. Jet lag had caught up on me. I'd been asleep nearly a day.
After a quick shower, I drove out to her rented house in Brentwood just in time to get to a party given by producer Philip Barry in his nearby English-style mansion. His playwright father, best known for The Philadelphia Story, lobbied Washington during the war to be appointed ambassador to Ireland.
"He thought that if he was appointed he could persuade de Valera to come in on the American side. Of course, he didn't succeed. But he got the idea for a play called Without Love."
The lawn and swimming pool were illuminated by candles set in brown paper bags. Sully Boyer, the versatile character actor who played the bank manager in Dog Day Afternoon and was the vaudeville club owner in The King Of Marvin Gardens, explained: "The idea is to drive away evil spirits." It seemed an appropriate superstition in Hollywood.
Diane Keaton and Elliott Gould arrived with Mark Rydall, who was directing their next movie I will, I Will... For Now. He spotted Cristal. "Tell John I'll be delighted to play the psychiatrist in his follow-up to The Exorcist," he joked.
I failed to recognise Sylvia Miles, who vamped Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely. "Here I am, twice nominated for an Oscar, and you don't know me," she protested, feigning outrage. Did she regard acting as a form of masochism? "No, kamikaze. Acting is a suicide dive."
It was that kind of party. You couldn't reach for an hors d'oeuvre without becoming entangled with a star.
Peter Finch was with Louise Fletcher, much admired for her portrayal of the domineering Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo's Nest. "There is a little bit of me in her," she said.
Finch remembered me from the Dublin première of Far From The Madding Crowd. He had had a flat in Donnybrook, where he had spent most of his time painting. Why did he leave Dublin? "I couldn't stand the pace, so I walked away to Cork." Walked? "Yes, but there were many pauses on the way."
Like falling in love, you never forget your first Oscars. I was lucky to start on the inside, where stars were just people. Over the years, all Academy nights seem to merge into one. The time Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for My Left Foot and promised "there'll be a great party in Dublin tonight", stands out, of course: it marked the breakthrough of Irish cinema as a world player, leading to Neil Jordan's best screenplay award for The Crying Game and tonight's bunch of young Irish animation nominees.
Jack Nicholson got it right when he told me – after picking up his Oscar for As Good As It Gets – that he was first attracted to Hollywood because he was star-struck. "I'm still star-struck. I love the glamour. My idea of a great evening is to be nominated and know you're not going to win. It's happened to me often enough, and I love it. You can party through the night."
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