Nude, Bald, Gone

I didn’t think there was anything fishy going on a few weeks ago, when some guy on the Internet announced the names of the Academy Award nominees a day before the Academy Award nominees were announced.

He got only one wrong.

Either this dude had a psychic hotline, or he personally polled enough Academy members to make an educated guess, or somehow he’d been tipped off.

Since the Oscar voting is usually the best-kept secret since J. Edgar Hoover’s sex life, I couldn’t believe anybody could actually crack Academy security that way.

I chalked it up to a guy who took a shot in the dark. Had he actually hit all five nominees in all five major categories on the nose, people would have been calling him the hottest Hollywood reporter of our time, the Woodward and Bernstein of celluloid, the Matt Drudge of show biz.

I mean, what a scoop.

But there just couldn’t be an Oscar leak, could there? Inconceivable. Ripping off something from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is like stealing gold from Fort Knox. You don’t get anything out of these people except name, rank and serial number. Even when they finally tell you who won, they won’t even tell you by how much.

I always picture Oscar envelopes being guarded day and night by muscular men standing with bazookas around a Brink’s truck, probably intense-looking guys in black suits and black sunglasses who look a lot like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.

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Anyhow, I figured that Internet thing for some kind of fluke.

Even if the guy did guess incorrectly, he wasn’t going to be penalized. What were they going to do, send him to Stupid Things Written on the Internet jail?

(Now, there’s a facility that would be overcrowded.)

I had total confidence in the Academy. If there was one thing I knew for sure in this world of ours, it was that the Oscars were in safe hands.

Then the ballots got lost.

A couple of weeks ago, more than 4,000 Academy voters failed to get their ballots in the mail so they could check off their choices for the 72nd annual Oscar presentation coming up a week from tonight.

That’s right, members of the Academy were standing in their bathrobes on their doorsteps throughout Southern California, extending open palms to their United States postal carriers and saying, “May I have the envelope, please?”

And all the postal people could say in reply was: “I got no envelopes.”

Somehow, thousands of official ballots had been misrouted--I love that word, misrouted--as third-class mail, after being dropped off at the Beverly Hills post office by the Academy’s accounting firm.

(Next time my rent is due, I intend to use this same excuse. “My check’s in the mail,” I’ll say. “It must have got misrouted.”)

The ballots were supposed to be first-class mail, inasmuch as the Academy is a first-class operation. And besides, I bet there are people in Beverly Hills who refuse to soil their hands with third-class mail. If a postman ever tried to hand Zsa Zsa Gabor third-class mail, she’d probably slap his face.

Well, the mail mess took a little time to sort out, but eventually the voting deadline was extended by 48 hours and everything was A-OK at the Academy again. Voters still had plenty of time to cast votes for 1999’s top films and performances. Heck, some of the voters even got two extra days so they could actually see some of these films and performances.

All was well in Oscarville.

Then the Oscars got stolen.

Or lost. Or misplaced. Or misrouted. Or they “fell off a truck,” as gangsters from New Jersey like to say.

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Ten cartons of golden, nude, bald guys--more than 50 Oscars in all--were nowhere to be found as of Friday morning, after a shipment to California from the factory in Chicago was reported missing.

(Possibly by a driver for Roadway Express who looked in the back of his truck and said, “Hey, where the hell are they?”)

Nobody knew how or why, but $18,000 worth of statuettes that were supposed to be on a loading dock in a town called Bell had disappeared. They were nowhere to be found, much like the town of Bell itself.

Roadway offered a $50,000 reward. The Oscar factory had to put crews on overtime to manufacture more of the little golden, nude, bald guys.

As for the red-faced folks from the Academy, they had to worry what would end up missing next--Jack Valenti’s speech? The “South Park” musical number? Jennifer Lopez’s dress?

Personally, I think Jim Carrey could be behind all this, for not having been nominated. Or else Andy Kaufman, who probably isn’t dead.

Either way, when the Oscar winners are called up to the stage next week, let’s just hope that the presenters won’t have to tell them: “Your statue’s in the mail.”

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail:

mike.downey@latimes.com