PARTY TIME: Tonight is Oscar night, and...

PARTY TIME: Tonight is Oscar night, and Orange County is celebrating with parties at places like Planet Hollywood, Roxbury and the Sports Club Irvine. . . . Playwrights and thespians will watch the telecast at the Laguna Playhouse and bestow some awards of their own. Last year, for example, they declared “Vidal Sasoon Bad-Hair Day” and “Edith Head Worst-Dressed” winners. . . . The $15-per-head event is “more of a friend-raiser for us than a fund-raiser,” says spokesman Richard Stein.

WEST COAST FRONT: Many motion pictures have been filmed in Orange County, but the most-awarded was “All Quiet on the Western Front,” an anti-war, World War I epic. . . . The 1930 film, shot in the then-barren hills above Corona del Mar where Harbor View Homes now stand, won Academy Awards for best picture and for best director, Lewis Milestone. . . . For trivia buffs: It was Milestone’s second milestone. He won best comedy director for “Two Arabian Knights” in 1928, the first-ever Oscar ceremony.

ROSIE RUBBLE: Actor-comedienne Rosie O’Donnell, one of the Oscar presenters tonight (her 32nd birthday), will star as Rizzo in the pre-Broadway tour of a revival of “Grease” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center beginning next week. . . . A resident of the San Fernando Valley who will stay locally during the run, O’Donnell has appeared in films like “A League of Their Own” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Come May she’ll be Betty Rubble in the movie version of the cartoon classic “The Flintstones.”

CLASS PROJECT: A group of USC cinema professors, addressing the Orange County alumni chapter in Santa Ana last week, told how difficult it will be for their kids to get into the film school. . . . Two films nominated for the best-documentary Oscar tonight were made by current USC students, and one made an Oscar-nominated film even before applying to USC. . . . It appears, joked USC administrator Mark Harris, that “you have to make an Academy Award-nominated film just to get into our school. This sets a new standard.”