The Oscar competition is bloody

We should thank our lucky stars Mary McNamara’s debut novel, “Oscar Season,” arrives when it does, because if the writers strike goes on much longer it could be the only decent glitz, gossip and suspense we’ll get this year about the Academy Awards.

This cheeky, engaging roman a clef is a guilty indulgence, like watching “Entertainment Tonight” when you really should be tuned to “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” It’s the perfect type of read for a nonstop flight between LAX and JFK and it’s smarter and better crafted by leagues than any Jackie Collins paperback, so you don’t even have to ashamedly hide it between the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.

“Oscar Season” centers on the mysterious, attractive, redheaded (isn’t that redundant?) Juliette Greyson, PR director for the Pinnacle, a high-end Westside hotel that is more outre than even the Four Seasons or the Peninsula, out to gather the most Oscar nominees as its guests and thereby become the epicenter of glamour and power in the month surrounding the Academy Awards, a.k.a. Oscar season.

But, as in all good page-turners, things go wrong faster than you can say “Nicole-stop-with-the-Botox-already.” For one, people start turning up dead -- first as a pre-Oscar prank to boost the award show’s flagging ratings, and then for real. Those include a guest at the Pinnacle who gets his throat slit -- a no-talent hack once married to our fair heroine Juliette. Josh Singer had taken all the credit for a script she co-wrote, left her for the leggy blond starlet on the set and wound up as a nominee for a screenplay Oscar. In other words, sure, the screenwriter deserves it, but now Juliette is a suspect. Luckily for her so is most of Hollywood. After all, entertainment is -- as one character observes -- “a cutthroat business.”

So whodunit? Could it be the power-hungry publicist Arnie Ellison, furious because the writer tried to get his starlet to defect to another agency, PMK? (And no, the Ellison character does not work for Wolf-Kasteler.) Or was it the twisted, jealous act of an aging diva trying for her last desperate go for the gold? Perhaps the machination of a Los Angeles Times reporter whose ambition to earn a Pulitzer for entertainment journalism (snicker, snicker) has eclipsed her better nature? Could it be the work of the rakish but secretly ill superstar Michael O’Connor (imagine a cross between George Clooney and Richard Gere absent any Bodhisattva tendencies), who may be in love with Juliette, as much as rakish superstars are capable of being in love? Or perhaps it is Juliette’s elusive and handsome boss at the hotel, Eamonn Devlin?

McNamara, a Los Angeles Times staff writer, has covered the entertainment industry extensively, so her writing can’t help being imbued with the confidence of a reporter who knows her beat well -- so well, in fact, that one suspects that she had become such a fount of juicy insider info that she had to write a novel. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. Surely she knows where some bodies are buried -- metaphorically speaking, of course.

Before it’s done, the tale will manage to weave in Margot Kidder’s unfortunate transient episode, various flavors of sex acts, the Irish Republican Army, last-minute lipo and Palm Springs -- not necessarily in that order.

You can’t help but enjoy McNamara’s pithy dialogue, fast pacing and trenchant observations -- beyond the obvious cracks about Hollywood’s strange parochialism and the communicable disease otherwise known as pathological narcissism. Every now and then a comment from one of her characters seems to reveal the writer’s own respect for and lingering ideals about the art of moviemaking. This speech by longtime Oscar show talent coordinator Andrea Chapman, recently sacked by an evil producer, provides a case study: “I mean, the whole point of the Oscars, in my mind anyway . . . is to show people the faces they don’t see, the people who put their hearts and souls into the movies and don’t get the big paychecks and the free diamonds. I mean, you can see Brad and Angelina on the cover of every magazine nowadays, but don’t you think the cinematographers and visual effects people, the screenwriters, deserve the same amount of glamour and dignity even for just one night?”

So what if the first couple pages of the book are a little purple, have so many tortured similes and overwrought metaphors they sound like an application for MFA school? And so what if there’s a Perry Mason sort of scene toward the end where all suspects stand around, essentially confessing guilt? It’s a good read and better than watching reruns of “Big Love.” Again.

I was going to mention the limited appeal of the insider aspect of this story to readers outside of L.A., but then my mother called from her retirement mobile home park in Las Cruces, N.M., to tell me the tragic news of Heath Ledger’s death, and mentioned, because I had not heard, that while Cate Blanchett had received a supporting actress nomination for her role in the Bob Dylan biopic, “I’m Not There,” he had not, and she wondered if he had been moved to end his life over that. That call taught me that McNamara has understood far better than I that Hollywood is America’s story.

“Oscar Season” ends with some questions answered and many others not -- will Juliette find love with a movie star or an Irish rogue? Will she move from public relations to screenwriting? I smell a sequel. There is, after all, still Cannes to consider. Stay tuned.

--

Samantha Dunn is the author of the novel “Failing Paris,” the nonfiction books “Faith in Carlos Gomez” and “Not by Accident.”