My Oscars adventure: parties, film cliques and selfies with Eddie Redmayne

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/23/oscars-adventure-parties-selfies-eddie-redmayne

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To go to the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles is a lot like – and I’ve thought about this a lot and there really is no other way to describe it – going to a bad barmitzvah. Sure, it’s a bit glitzier, generally bigger and there’s more chance that you’ll see Steve Martin than at your average Jewish festival, but the rudiments are the same.

There are the bizarrely dressed guests: sweetly, many of the female guests who are about as close to being nominated as I am like to come dressed as Oscar winners, circa 1987, replete with trains and occasional tiaras. You’d have to go to Disney World to see so many grown women wearing full-body princess dresses as you do in the Oscars audience.

Most of all, there is the repeated message that the only reason this event still happens is because it always has – tradition, in other words, as they say in Fiddler on the Roof. All around the inside of the Dolby theater, giant black and white photos from Oscars’ illustrious past deck the walls: Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher! Rock Hudson! Audrey Hepburn! You can hardly move without being bashed over the head with some fact about Oscars’ longevity (87 years! 87 years!, went the litany this year from officials and hosts, almost like a rosary prayer) and the ceremony’s cultural legacy (oddly, I didn’t spot any references to, say, How Green Was My Valley bagging the Oscar over Citizen Kane, let alone any photos of that great moment when Crash won in 2006. No, the Academy prefers anecdotes involving Audrey Hepburn looking pretty in a Givenchy dress).

“Our work will be judged, as always, by time,” best director winner Alejandro González Iñárritu said in one of his several acceptance speeches, which is a good sentiment for the Oscars themselves, but less so for the kind of movies that tend to win Oscars. When was the last time anyone watched The King’s Speech (let alone How Green Was My Valley)? But the movies aren’t the point of the Oscars anymore: no one really expects them to determine film quality any more than barmitzvahs signify a 13-year-old reaching adulthood – they’re about tradition, parties and a ton of swag.

I’ve been covering the Oscars for the Guardian for four years now. The first year, I turned up in LA only to discover I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the event itself and ended up watching it on the TV in my hotel room. The second year, I was allowed to walk down the red carpet – albeit the day before the event, and was then banished back to my hotel room. Last year, I was granted entrance to the press room during the Academy Awards, where all the winners come after their acceptance speech and are subjected to a veritable grilling from the world’s press (sample question: “Ms Blanchett, how do you feel about being a style icon?”). This year, the Guardian scores something of a coup and gets me a ticket into the Dolby theater for the actual ceremony. At the rate I’m progressing through the Academy’s system, I expect I’ll win the best director Oscar next year.

A ticket to the Dolby theater! Pictures dance through my head the week before: of me, laughing chummily with my seat neighbour, Julianne Moore, as we watch Neil Patrick Harris’s opening number; of me, being caught on the world’s TV cameras applauding tearfully but also beatifically during the montage of people who died this year; of me, patting Eddie Redmayne’s arm with almost maternal pride as he gets up to collect his Oscar, and of him pretending to know who I am and thanking me profusely, because those are the kind of manners I imagine young chaps are taught at Eton.

Of course, when I go to collect my ticket the day before the event – the collection of which requires almost FBI-levels of security and clearance – I realise that absolutely none of those things are going to happen. Yes, I’ll be in the theater during the Oscars, but I probably won’t be sitting with the celebrities, seeing as my ticket says I’ll be on “level 2”, or what American sports fans call “the nosebleed seats”. I somehow suspect Julianne Moore is not in section two.

And so it transpires when I eventually make it to my seat, and section two can be summed up as “for the extended family of nominees for minor awards”; my row gets very excited during the awards for Live Action and Animated Shorts. First, though, I have to walk the rain-sodden red carpet, beset on one side by screaming fans and on the other by screaming photographers, and the only differences between the two groups are that the photographers sound more desperate and have more threatening accessories. Officials – and I would modestly estimate that there are at least three officials to each guest – firmly hurry along the guests whose dresses are of no interest to the TV people so that the red carpet doesn’t get too cluttered with peasants. Even if you have a ticket to the event, the Oscars is hyper-aware of hierarchy and maintains it with the neuroticism of a girls’ school clique.

The ceremony starts at 5.30pm but when I find out that the canapes are served from 3.30, I obviously make sure to arrive by 3. (I needn’t have bothered – the only canapes I get my mitts on are vegetable slices dipped in tomato sauce, which is the kind of thing I’d eat when stoned, which today I sadly am not.) However, the actual theatre is, rather glamorously, attached to a shopping mall, and there is nothing like tramping past a Subway at 3pm on a Sunday in full party makeup and heels to make a woman feel that perhaps she took a wrong turn in life somewhere.

Once inside, the hierarchies continue: the celebrities are seated on the ground floor with access to their own bar, while us proles – families of nominees, extended film crews, random hangers-on like myself – are kept strictly on the other side of the velvet rope and shown upstairs. My editor had dreamily mooted the idea that I would be hanging out at the bar with the Clooneys, but at “my” bar, the only vaguely famous face I spot is Morgan Spurlock, who I’m guessing he won’t consider a sufficient alternative.

I’ve been watching the Oscars for as long as I can remember – I even used to tape them as a kid to watch the next day (and repeatedly after that), and even though I do know that Santa doesn’t exist, one truth I’d always taken for granted is that the Oscars are glamorous. You’d have thought that years covering fashion shows for this paper would have taught me that these sorts of events are rarely the way they look on television, but apparently not. When I walk into the auditorium, I’m actually surprised at how it looks: not the pinnacle of glamour, but like Joan Collins’s wardrobe in 1985, which is a slightly different thing. Everything inside, it seems, is fringed with diamante, including the balconies, and the stage itself is shimmering with glittery Oscars branding. It us like a nine-year-old girl’s idea of glamour, sort of like how the outfits quite a few of the women are wearing are a nine-year-old girl’s idea of a party dress. There is something sweetly childish about the Oscars.

And here’s the funny thing about the Oscars: after a while, they’re hard to resist. So even though I do (as you might have guessed by now) find all the full-length chiffon and corseted gowns around me completely ridiculous, they somehow begin to look right in the context of the Oscars. By contrast, the short tunic dress I opted for, in a misguided moment of thinking I could stay aloof from all the Oscars fussiness, feels almost frumpy as the evening goes on, even disrespectful, what with my knobbly knees showing (handkerchief clutched to lips in horror). I now see why most celebrities end up wearing oversized ballgowns to this thing: it takes nerve to fight against the traditional Oscars doctrine.

Everyone is just so damn excited to be there, including the celebrities, to the point that taking frequent selfies in front of the Oscars insignia seems almost obligatory. At the Governor’s Ball afterwards, I crunch down on Julianne Moore’s foot (she was extremely sweet about it) because I hadn’t realised that she and her ridiculously good-looking husband Bart had stopped to take selfies of each other with her Oscar, which they proceed to do for a hilariously long time. My editor had asked me beforehand if I would ask as many celebrities as possible to take selfies with me at the parties and, to my amazement, most of them agree with enthusiasm, even those who have every right to be a bit naffed off with the Oscars – Richard Linklater, for one, is especially happy to have some selfie action at the ball, despite his somewhat hangdog-like smile after losing repeatedly to Iñárritu. (I suspect his enthusiams is also down to him being probably the sweetest man in the movie business.)

The only one who outright refuses is Eddie Murphy, whom I spot, with my starstruck heart in my quivering mouth (AXEL FOLEY 4EVA), walking next to me on the way into the Governor’s Ball. “Mr Murphy, my editor has asked me to take selfies with as many celebrities as possible. Would you by any chance agree to posing for one with me?”, is what I start to say to him. But, perhaps to Murphy’s credit, he stalks off at the word “selfies”, leaving me with only a cold and withering look. Billy Ray Valentine would have given me a selfie, for sure.

Others, though, are not so above it all. The food at the Governor’s Ball is classic rich people’s party food – baked potatoes stuffed with caviar, I kid you not – and the table featuring mini chocolate Oscars covered in gold leaf has a veritable crowd around it with people taking photos. The most desirable accessories of the night, it seems, are Lego versions of the Oscar, distributed to the few during the Everything is Awesome number – Marion Cotillard, who has an actual Oscar, faux jokingly tries to steal Steve Carell’s, and he refuses to give it to her.

The Governor’s Ball is a slightly odd affair, in that it’s a giant party just downstairs from the ceremony – it is a little like having an office Christmas party in the office. As such, there is a still an air of the losers smarting a little: the first thing I see when I walk in is Ethan Hawke loudly insisting to a group of people that “We’re all really happy anyway,” while the rest of the Boyhood crew huddle protectively together. Each movie group – Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Selma, etc – sits defensively together, sort of like high-school cliques in the canteen of an 80s teen movie, and those proud, defiant smiles they managed to maintain for TV have long since wobbled away a bit. You don’t need to have watched the ceremony to tell who the winners were (Julianne Moore, for one, is positively giddy; Linklater is not).

The food is made by that ubiquitous chef-to-the-wealthy, Wolfgang Puck, and the music comes from the equally and wearily ubiquitous will.i.am, who I think might have actually cloned himself by now. There is a distinct air of barmitzvah-esque, everything-done-by-rote weariness in the air.

By the time the guests have their fill of caviar-stuffed potatoes and get in their limos to the Vanity Fair party across town, most are sufficiently well lubricated to deal with one another: I walk in to see Benedict Cumberbatch standing by the bar with Joan Collins, while Patrick Stewart and Jared Leto are expressing mutual admiration for one another nearby. When Eddie Redmayne arrives with his Oscar (and proving my theory about Etonians, he does pretend to know me when I approach him for a selfie), he is immediately pounced upon by Judd Apatow, perhaps looking for a replacement in his gang should Seth Rogen be kidnapped by the North Koreans.

By now, the evening feels more like the end of school year party, with the celebrities looking frankly giddy that they will no longer be schlepping around the world, watching the same people win almost the same awards, over and over again. From there, most people go on to what is widely agreed to be the ultimate Oscars after-party, the one thrown by Madonna’s friend, Guy Oseary. I know it must be the best one because it’s the one that I’m not invited to.

The Oscars are completely ridiculous: tacky, predictable and basically an overblown trade show. But to hate on them is like hating a cheesy Hollywood movie: discernment is not the point, just give in and enjoy the silliness. Even Eddie Murphy looks as if he’s enjoying himself at the Vanity Fair party, I notice on my way out. But not, I suspect, quite enough for a selfie.