Oscars Oscars Read All About ‘Em

Well, it’s Oscar time again, and L.A. is gripped with a madness bordering on hysteria. Let’s face it, living in L.A. during Academy Award season is not all that it’s cracked up to be. The chances are slim to none that any of us will ever see the inside of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on that magical night, even if your mother and Mike Ovitz’s Aunt Bernice are best friends from grade school.

Only 3,000 souls will get to see the event live, and fully half of them will have to sit in the balcony. This sad fact leaves us with few alternatives. If you’re really motivated, you can camp out for three days outside the auditorium, fighting with several thousand tourists to glimpse the top of Cher’s headdress, or for the chance to see our local news reporters wearing 10 pounds of makeup and 35 pounds of glass beading in broad daylight.

However, if you really want to impress your friends (or your cat) with your command of Oscar trivia, or if you’ve decided that this is the year you are finally going to bet some big money, you have two solid weeks to do some research. Two contenders for your Oscar-related dollar are: “Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards” by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona (Ballantine: $20), weighing in at 1,070 pages in softcover, and “Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards” by Anthony Holden (Simon & Schuster: $25), a 672-page hardcover. They both boast a disclaimer that they are in no way affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which leads one to believe that these books are really going to dish.

“Behind the Oscar” is definitely the more highbrow of the two tomes, presenting a carefully researched history organized by decade and theme.

The author theorizes on the delicate balance between artistic accomplishment, box-office success and emotional manipulation that is required to secure a nomination, and he has actually developed a pretty convincing set of “rules” for determining who will win and why.

The major scandals of Oscar history are here as well, along with in-depth looks at some of the more recent ceremonies and the heavy head-tripping that we, the star-struck public, rarely see.

“Inside Oscar” is much closer to the Hollywood Babylon tradition of Hollywood reportage. The ultimate quick reference guide to the Oscars, it contains a blow-by-blow, year-by-year description of each ceremony, and can be read in any order you desire. It also serves up bountiful helpings of nasty quotes, scathing fashion analysis and multitudinous facts guaranteed to send even the Jeopardy Champion of Champions to bed for a week. With subheadings like “Invalids on Parade,” “Slut of All Time,” “Porno Brando” and “Cover that Cleavage,” this book doesn’t pull any punches.

While “Behind the Oscar” gives you the meat, “Inside Oscar” spoon-feeds you the potatoes. Consider, if you will, these quotes: “The Academy Awards are obscene, dirty and no better than a beauty contest” (two-time winner Dustin Hoffman) and “The Oscars make my pits wet” (hunk and winner Kevin Costner).

Both books boast excellent appendices that include every nominee, winner, honorary recipient, and more fun facts than you can shake a stick at (only one guy named Oscar has ever won an Oscar: Oscar Hammerstein II for Best Song in 1941 and 1945). “Inside” also boasts a listing of the films that the authors feel were overlooked in the Best Picture category by the Academy, like “The African Queen” (1951).

In many cases they’re right.

So get to work, class, and when this year’s ceremony comes to a close, you can smugly report to your cat that the Oscars are entirely predictable, even when they’re surprising. That might be what keeps us watching. Or, as Gary Busey has observed, “Oscar night is just another excuse to get drunk.”