OSCAR TOME IS TRULY AN ‘INSIDE’ JOB

“There are a lot of people we have to thank. Our editor Bob Wyatt . . . everyone who believed in us when we weren’t so sure what we were doing ourselves.”

Damien Bona’s eyes misted over as he spoke. It was an acceptance speech, heartfelt . . . and ironic.

“Jeez, this sounds like an Oscar speech,” Bona said, catching himself. “Now I know how they feel.”

What Bona had just accepted, with a stab of emotion during a recent dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel, was a compliment for the tenacity and endurance he and his friend Mason Wiley had shown in their four-year research and writing of “Inside Oscar,” the compendium to end all compendia of Academy Awards trivia.

But what the heck. Four years is more than four times longer than a lot of this week’s Oscar winners spent earning their awards. Bona and Wiley ought to make a speech somewhere.

“Inside Oscar,” published by Ballantine Books this month to hitch a ride on publicity attending the 1986 show, is one of the heaviest books ever written on the film industry: It must weigh six or seven pounds. It contains more than 800 pages of prose, written by amateurs, and displays only a handful of photographs.

But the bulk of the book is its only drawback. For unabashed Oscar junkies, for people who not only want to remember but need to remember the exact words uttered by David Niven after the Oscar show was struck by a streaker in 1973, this is mainline stash.

Bona and Wiley, former Columbia University classmates who shared the seasonal affliction of Oscaritis (in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of the Academy Awards?), have put together a detailed year-by-year recap of the Oscar shows and the campaigns and stories leading up to them.

It is essentially a “clip job,” tidbits, trends and gossip culled from months of library research, plus their own wry and often insightful observations of the taped and filmed shows they were able to view.

Even though the book travels forward in chronological fashion, from the first Oscar season in 1927 to last year’s, you can plunge in anywhere you like. Each year is treated as a self-contained drama, recalling the politics and sentiments within the industry that affected the Oscar outcome.

Imagine standing in the middle of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, wishing that you could pan every nugget from its mother lode of Oscar history. Wiley, a co-author of “The Preppy Handbook,” and Bona have done it for us.

“We started out thinking we would do a funny book on the Oscars,” Bona said. “We were going to do things like follow Sammy Davis Jr.’s history at the Oscars to show what the fashion fads were those years. We were going to reprint Greer Garson’s entire speech (generally considered the longest ever) from the 1942 awards.”

Their publisher talked them into taking their research a little more seriously, Bona said, and the long ordeal began. The first publication target date for the book was November, 1982, he said. They delivered the semifinal manuscript two years later, then updated it with the 1985 Oscar show to make it current.

(Alas, it is already out of date, but Bona says there are plans to update it periodically.)

Bona, 31, said that he and Wiley, 30, decided to try an Oscar book after realizing they shared a unique commitment to an array of facts that most of their classmates considered intellectual popcorn. He recalls the two of them standing on campus dazzling other students with their ability to correctly answer such questions as how long did the 1958 show run?

But it was not until Bona had completed law school and had practiced that mundane profession for two years that they got started on what became “Inside Oscar.”

“I had to choose between a job and an obsession,” Bona said. “I chose the obsession.”

Bona said he has never attended an Oscar show and doesn’t want to (“I want to be able to yell at the screen when Sally Field embarrasses herself”), but he admits to having a few fantasies about being on stage and making a real acceptance speech.

“Of course I dream about that,” said Bona, who is now writing a script for an afternoon children’s TV special. “It’s everybody’s fantasy.”