Following the Oscars, With Love: Meet Our Oscarologist

If a color photograph existed showing reporters gathered around Barbra Streisand in the press room of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after she'd won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1969, you'd see a young man in a brown suit sandwiched among a crowd in black tuxedos and elegant gowns. That misfit would be me.

I was a sportswriter for a suburban southern California newspaper then, but if there was one thing I knew I would enjoy more than watching an athlete set a world record, it would be seeing a movie star receive an Academy Award. I'd been watching the Oscars on television as far back as I could remember, and had been betting on their outcomes for about as long. It occurred to me during my first year in newspapers that I might wrangle a press pass to the show itself. If a color photograph existed showing reporters gathered around Barbra Streisand in the press room of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after she'd won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1969, you'd see a young man in a brown suit sandwiched among a crowd in black tuxedos and elegant gowns. That misfit would be me.

I was a sportswriter for a suburban southern California newspaper then, but if there was one thing I knew I would enjoy more than watching an athlete set a world record, it would be seeing a movie star receive an Academy Award. I'd been watching the Oscars on television as far back as I could remember, and had been betting on their outcomes for about as long. It occurred to me during my first year in newspapers that I might wrangle a press pass to the show itself.

It wouldn't happen now, but it did then. The Academy honored my request and though I was naively under-dressed -- who knew reporters wore tuxedos in a press room? -- I spent that night in a little corner of heaven. Not only did I see Streisand in the flesh, I saw Streisand in the flesh. That was the year she wore her scandalous see-through pantsuit over skimpy black underwear, and one had trouble averting his eyes.

Other stars passed through the press room that night, including presenters Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Rosaline Russell. If I'd had the nerve, I could have asked one a question. But I didn't have the nerve. Nor did I want to draw attention to my sad-sack apparel. But as one of my early editors predicted -- "Keep writing and one day the right job will find you" -- I became a movie reporter, columnist and critic and got to ask stars lots of questions.

My first movie reporting job was for the Detroit Free Press in 1979, 10 years after my Oscar press-room debut, and over the next decade and a half, I covered almost every ceremony -- always in a tuxedo. I was there when Robert De Niro won Best Actor for 'Raging Bull' and saw his reaction when a reporter asked him about John Hinkley, Jr. , the madman who had attempted to assassinate President Reagan the day before..

De Niro must have known the question was coming; the media was full of reports of Hinkley's obsession with Travis Bickle, the actor's disturbed character in 'Taxi Driver.' But he was dumbstruck by it, no less. He stammered for a moment, said 'I'm sure you're all nice people,' and then dropped the mic on the floor and walked out.

The next year, I watched my Free Press colleague Shirley Eder arrive at the Oscars in a limo with her friend Barbara Stanwyck, who was to receive a life achievement award. Backstage, Eder told me that on the ride over Stanwyck said that when the Academy called to tell her about the award, they promised her the greatest entrance in Oscar history. She would appear at the top of a staircase rising from the stage into the rafters and slowly walk down to a three-minute standing ovation.

As Eder relayed the story, the feisty legend responded, 'F--- you, if you want that kind of entrance, give the award to Bette Davis.'

I told Shirley, 'That's a fabulous quote, you have to clean it up and put it in the paper.' She said, 'My dear, if you put that kind of quote in the paper, you don't get any more.'

I didn't learn much from Shirley. As I migrated from the Free Press to USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, I put a lot of things in the paper that upset people. I remember being introduced to Anne Archer the year after she'd been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for 'Fatal Attraction.' I had written very damning things about that movie's Oscar chances, in particular her chances, and from the stink eye she gave me, I knew she remembered.

But there were good times, too. On the day before the 1987 Oscar nominations were announced, I predicted that David Lynch would be nominated as Best Director for 'Blue Velvet.' He was and hours after the announcement, he called to ask me why I'd predicted it, since his closest friends hadn't dared to hope. I told him the directors branch of the Academy always seemed to reserve a spot for a director whose film they admired but knew it was too edgy to win. They still do.

In this, my 40th year of writing about the Academy Awards, it strikes me that Oscar coverage has grown exponentially with the amount of criticism it receives. It's a horse race. It's a popularity contest. It's meaningless. The wrong movies win and the right ones don't even get nominated. During my career as a movie critic, people complained that I spent too much time thinking about Oscars and not enough about movies made in Farsi.

I plead no contest. The Oscars are not a guilty pleasure for me, they're the reason I get out of the bed in the mid-winter. Like everyone else, I complain, of course. Ten Best Picture nominees this year? What were they thinking? But for all the mistakes the Academy and its members have made, I would argue that for 81 years, they have done a remarkable job of sorting the wheat from the chafe, of honoring the best of the best -- even if occasionally with make-up awards for the wrong movies (Paul Newman's lone Best Actor Oscar was for the mundane 'The Color of Money') or life achievement (Charlie Chaplin's only Oscar, presented in 1972).

So, we're off. This is the first among many Oscar columns I'll be writing for Moviefone as we travel down the Oscar trail, from here to show time March 7. If you have any questions, about past or current Oscar seasons, let me know and I'll try to answer them.