Need a Little Help on the Office Oscar Pool? Click and You Shall Receive

“We want to thank all of you for watching us congratulate ourselves tonight,” Warren Beatty told America in 1976 after the annual self-love fest known as the Academy Awards. For those of us who won’t be in the Dorothy Chandler on March 21, Oscar night still promises oodles to ooh and ahh about, whether one is in front of the telly or, in newfangled fashion, online.

As some of us gear up to shell out 20 bucks for the annual Oscar pool, it behooves one to mop up a little Oscar expertise via the Web’s vast treasure trove of Oscar content.

Say you launch off from Oscar central, the official site at https://www.oscar.com/. Here you’ll find a hypertext haven for nominees and their film clips. After watching a postage stamp-sized Real Video snippet of the exalted films, take a shot at predicting the winners online, and you could win a grand weekend at the 72nd Academy Awards, a.k.a Oscar 2000.

For those who are better versed at Oscars bygone, traipse over to Oscar.com’s Know-It-All Challenge, where you can diagnose your Academy Award acumen in a multiple-choice memory game. At Red Carpet Retro, you can relive the innumerable fashion misstatements of yesteryear. Remember costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, decked out in a credit card frock? An archives section features an Academy Awards History Database. Print out an Oscar ballot to bring to your own VIP fete.

Another swell site to brush up on your Oscar perspicacity is Mr. Showbiz’s Oscar Gallery at https://mrshowbiz.go.com/features/oscars_99/gallery.html. Here you can lap up Oscar news, interviews with the nominees (text and sound files), a photo gallery, and Eleonore Snow’s sagacious predictions of not only who will win, but also who should win and why. She believes “Saving Private Ryan” both should win and will win. As Snow surmises, Oscar tends to be terribly fond of the proverbial dramatic, gut-wrenching epic.

Now is as good a time as ever to visit the Miramax Caf, the official Miramax Web site (https://www.miramax.com) that hosts two multi-nominated films. Both “Shakespeare in Love” and “Life Is Beautiful” have their own sub-site, where you can download a teeny-tiny moving Gwyneth or Roberto discussing their films.

Time Warner has its own special Oscar corner, where its many magazines conspire to provide the last word in Oscar coverage (https://pathfinder.com/pathfinder/features/oscars/). Sure there are film clips, photos, bios and interviews galore, but most fun of all is the games domain, where you can “Test Your F.Q. (Film Quotient)” by answering: Who said that? Who did that? And who made that speech? FYI, it was Dustin Hoffman who said, “I’d like to thank my mother and father for not practicing birth control.”

There are a gazillion other Internet locales for trivia quizzes and whatnot, but this year (as more and more of us relent and hook up to such broad bandwidth byways as a T1 or DSL connection provides), the Web is offering an array of original Real Video documentaries about all things Oscar.

Alternative Entertainment Television has created a streaming video library (https://www.aentv.com/home/awards/academy.htm)that trips through the decades with rare video clips, old trailers and behind-the-scenes footage of the Oscars, as well as the Oscar-winning films. There’s also a link to the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 American films. Amazingly, almost every one of the 100 films is hyperlinked to a streaming video documentary about the film. (A film school education is just 100 clicks away!)

Always a smart choice in film content, Film.com is offering its own Oscar Watch at https://www.film.com/reviews/features/awards/98oscars/. Aside from providing snips and clips of films and interviews, its original “Oscar Show” is a five-part series of Real Video episodes including, most interestingly, a documentary about the controversy surrounding the honorary Oscar for director Elia Kazan.

Cineastes, commence prognostication.

*

Erika Milvy writes about arts and entertainment from her home in San Francisco. She can be reached at erika@well.com.