Hammering Oscars home

WITH apologies to Diane Keaton, Patricia Clarkson, Johnny Depp, the art director from “Seabiscuit”: If you win an Oscar this year, I won’t remember.

I didn’t remember that “Chicago” won best picture last year, or that Halle Berry was best actress in 2002. I had to ask. Was it just me? As an experiment, I began quizzing friends and relatives. Quick: What won best picture two years ago? Who won best actor last year? I was met with more than a few blank stares, although in fairness, I am often met with more than a few blank stares.

Still, this Oscar amnesia has chilling implications. It suggests that the hundreds of hours of Oscar-related programming on E! Entertainment Television, “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” don’t actually mean anything. More important, it illustrates a yearly Oscar fallacy: We watch the buildup, talk about the buildup, read about the buildup, and then it all goes poof from our minds not a moment after.

What’s the point of the intense focus, if it’s only to be followed by the instant forgetting? Sufficiently disturbed, I consulted Todd Braver, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. Our meeting was on the phone, and ultimately not as cathartic as the one between Matt Damon and Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting.” Prof. Braver and I had a good introductory session. Possibly he didn’t see it as therapy, but OK. He quickly caught my attention by comparing the retrieval of information through memory to a Google search. Meaning that while it would be nice to think our memories work as efficiently as a search engine, there are variables, including the key words you use to find the information.

Take last year’s best actor. It became clear that I couldn’t remember the winner because I hadn’t properly encoded the information (thanks a lot, Mary Hart) and thus lacked the necessary key associations. I asked Prof. Braver how I might avoid this happening again if, say, “Mystic River” wins best picture.

“Plant it down with an association that might be more distinctive,” he said, “so that when you’re thinking about that a year later, what comes to your mind is an association more uniquely structured to that movie than other things.”

As he spoke, I pictured watching the Oscars with a hammer, and banging my thumb with it when the best picture is announced. Then I wondered if perhaps I could bang each finger on my right hand for each of the major awards. Best supporting actor, pinkie finger; best supporting actress, ring finger; and so on up to the thumb and best picture.

Then again, maybe a hammer would become redundant and other tools would be needed.

We talked on. If “Mystic River” wins for best picture, Prof. Braver said, perhaps I could teach myself to associate the film with the image of a river with an Oscar floating in it. Or something equally vivid.

I told Prof. Braver that my inability to recall specific Oscar winners seemed like proof that I didn’t consider them important. Worse, as an entertainment journalist, I had terribly ambivalent feelings about my own complicity in the hype. I called the hype “a cacophony.”

“Cacophony is a good word,” Prof. Braver said. Then he used another word, “interference.” As in, “We know that interference is a really big problem with memory.” With the Oscars, he said, every year the same thing happens: Lots of movies get released and a few get nominated, and one wins, but the whole ritual, by its very sameness, breeds forgetting. It’s like if you park your car in the same parking lot every day, but you randomly choose a different space. Remembering where you parked your car on a given day becomes problematic because the salient information -- the space -- is interfered with by all the details that are the same: the lot, the cars, the elevators.

But to get back to last year’s best actor. Had I been more focused, I could have encoded the information this way: Adrien Brody, who was named best actor for “The Pianist,” soul-kissed Halle Berry, who was a presenter because she was best actress in 2002. And Halle Berry, of course, pleaded no contest to charges of leaving the scene of a traffic accident in 2000, one year before the movie “Traffic” was nominated for best picture, and lost, although Steven Soderbergh won for best director.

Later, I thought I should have asked Prof. Braver if he knew who won best actor last year, or best picture in 2002. But then I remembered: He’s in the middle of the country, studying real things.

Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul. brownfield@latimes. com.