I found it oddly surreal and sad watching the Oscars tonight. It used to be such a big deal to me, but tonight just felt detached and foreign, Maybe it's the fact that just a few short years ago I always threw a huge catered Oscar party, and now I sit and watch them from Bakersfield. Maybe it's the fact that I no longer work in "the biz". And not by choice.
When I first started working in entertainment advertising, in the pre-digital era, I was the one stuck at our production house on Oscar night supervising the ads that would run in the next day's papers all over the country...
"WINNER X ACADEMY AWARDS!"
Usually we had them mocked up with "WINNER 0 ACADEMY AWARDS!" before the show began, and ratcheted up the count as the evening went on. One year I had the misfortune to work on "The Prince Of Tides", and Barbra Streisand had been such an absolute bitch throughout the whole process that we decided to do it backwards. The film had been nominated for 9 or 10 Oscars and we had it mocked up with "WINNER 10 ACADEMY AWARDS!", and as each category came up, and it lost, a cheer would go up as we ripped the number off and put the next lowest one on. When "Best Picture" came up, it's last chance to take home an award, and it lost, we popped champagne. Totally shut out. Nada.
I'd chalk it up to karma, but in Hollywood, assholes win all the time, so it was nothing more than a fluke.
One of my first apartments was a block from the old Spago restaurant, home of the legendary Swifty Lazar Oscar party. It was limo gridlock for blocks, with Wolfgang Puck being helicoptered in from the Governor's Ball downtown. Years later the hot ticket was the Vanity Fair party at Morton's, a couple of blocks from my first condo. And once my career took off, I adopted Oscar night as "my" holiday. Other people were known for their Christmas parties, or their Labor Day pool parties, I was known for Oscar night.
But those days are gone.
Memories.
Misty water-colored memories.
Of "The Way We Were"... "WINNER 2 ACADEMY AWARDS!"
