Before we commence, let me make you a promise. The whole point of the “I was there!” Oscars report hinges on the manner in which the writer brushed against celebrities. Once brushed, the writer passes that experience along to the reader, so that we might all share in the secondhand glow of Hollywood’s starriest night. So, my promise is this: it’s coming. My meaningful celebrity encounter of the night is coming, OK? Just be patient.
Now, I attended the Oscars for one reason: I wanted to see if it was better in person than it is on TV. Because, as a piece of television, the Oscars is generally dreadful. The ceremony is too long and often the films celebrated aren’t the ones people have seen.
Plus, the show tends to be hamstrung by its format. If it sticks to the same formula year after year, it is boring. But if it tries to mix things up, it is excruciating. (Remember the year they held it in a train station and made Glenn Close twerk?) In other words, being the Oscars is about as impossible as Barbie said it was to be a woman.
But perhaps we are missing something by watching it on a screen. Maybe the definitive way to experience the Oscars is to go to Los Angeles and soak up the atmosphere. If you spend time around the winners, the Oscars might start to make some sense. Maybe, I thought, if I experienced the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity, everything would click into place. I might even end up a born-again Academy Awards convert.
At least, that was my intention. Unfortunately, as someone who ranks extremely low on the entertainment industry’s totem pole, I don’t possess the status to experience the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity. They get to sit close to the stage. Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about them. People are desperate to be around them. None of that happened to me.
In a sense, that didn’t matter, because it meant I got to experience another side of the ceremony that simply isn’t available to TV viewers. That’s right, on Sunday night, I got to participate in the normal people Oscars.
***
Let me explain. The thing you need to understand about the Oscars is that the Dolby theatre is huge. The part you see at home, the rows and rows of gussied-up A-listers sitting in seats that appear to be individually lit, represents only a tiny sliver of the auditorium. Above them is a mezzanine full of people. And above that mezzanine is another mezzanine. And above that is another one. It’s like nesting tables of more than 3,000 progressively less famous people going all the way up to heaven.
The people on the mezzanines aren’t going to win anything, because it would take them 15 minutes to navigate all the stairs and elevators necessary to get them to the stage. Maybe these people are guests of a nominee. Maybe they worked in a department that was run by a nominee. Maybe they won a competition or, worse, they are a journalist. Collectively, these people struggle to muster the charisma of a single Ryan Gosling or Robert Downey Jr. They are normal people, so they find themselves packed into the human lasagne that is the mezzanine system.
At least the Oscars is upfront about this. As soon as you arrive at the venue, you are greeted by two separate red carpets. One of these is for the celebrity Oscars, for movie stars who are bound by convention to stop and linger in front of photographers. The other is for the normal people Oscars, for regular schmoes whom no one wants to photograph. This doesn’t mean that they don’t want to be photographed, of course. On the basis of Sunday night, the normal people are hellbent on walking the red carpet as slowly as possible, in the vain hope that they might hit the jackpot and accidentally end up in the background of a Getty Images gallery of someone recognisable.
In fairness, the normal people red carpet might be more fun than the proper one. On my red carpet, people don’t constantly scream your name with an intensity that borders on terrifying. Plus, you end up in the auditorium lobby, where all the free champagne is. It just seems much less stressful not to be famous.
However, mix-ups do occur. On the way in, I found myself stuck behind the Godzilla Minus One crew in the entrance to the lobby (this isn’t my meaningful celebrity encounter, by the way). These people were happily identifying themselves, by holding aloft a bunch of plastic Godzilla toys at every opportunity.
Another notable aspect of the normal people Oscars is its total lack of reverence. On the lower floor, the A-listers have to be prim and attentive at all times in case they annoy someone who could end their career. The mezzanine people have no such concerns. This extends to the servers. One of them was walking around with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. I asked her what they were and she just shrugged politely. Doesn’t matter, her smile implied. They are free and you are normal; you are going to eat it. And I did. That woman could see into my very soul.
Once seated in our mezzanine, it became clear that no one at home would be able to see what we were doing. So, at the normal people Oscars, people can do whatever they like. They might talk through awards, or constantly text people, or misjudge the tone by yelling: “Holy shit, is that Andrea Bocelli?!” during the In Memoriam segment. In the case of the woman sitting next to me, it meant spending the whole ceremony scrolling through the billions of red carpet selfies you took on your way in. Doesn’t matter. These are the normal people Oscars. No one can see us. There are no rules.
***
At this point, I wasn’t convinced by the normal people Oscars. The theatre is so big that the celebrity Oscars seemed as if it was happening a million miles away. There was no thrill in seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito share a stage, because they were basically a dot and a slightly smaller dot trading jokes about the best way to murder Batman. Also, there was a moment when Kimmel announced that he had supplied everyone in the audience with tequila. You are way ahead of me here, but he wasn’t referring to us lowly mezzanine folk.
But then something changed. An extraordinarily friendly woman sat next to me and informed me that her daughter had been nominated. It turned out that she was the mother of a production designer from one of the bigger films of the night. The pride bursting out of this woman was incredible. She listed all the films on which her daughter had worked and explained how her daughter had been mentored by another nominee.
This woman was so relentlessly enthusiastic about her child that I found myself rooting for her, too. Suddenly, I had skin in the game. This made an enormous difference. When you watch the Oscars on TV, or even when you attend as a dispassionate spectator, it doesn’t make much difference who wins or loses. But the mezzanines are full of people – parents, friends, colleagues – who are championing a particular film, all supporting their nominees in the same way that football fans do. There is something at stake.
As the night unfolded, more and more clusters of people like this began to reveal themselves. In front of me was a Poor Things contingent, who stood up and cheered and wept when the film won its flurry of awards. Behind me were representatives of Society of the Snow, who became wild with excitement whenever anyone said the film’s title. A nearby crowd of Maestro crew members whooped and yelled support for their film in such a genuine way that I briefly found myself feeling bad for hating Maestro.
You hear these people sometimes when you watch the Oscars on TV. They are whooping because they are proud. But they are also whooping because, on some level, they want to remind the world about the mezzanines. They exist, too.
It is weird what gets you excited at the normal people Oscars. Obviously, there were no famous people on my mezzanine. But when Cillian Murphy won best actor and namechecked his children, a burble of excitement broke out in my row. There wasn’t a hope in hell that we would get close to Murphy himself, but his kids? Good enough.
By the end of the night, the magic of the Oscars had managed to permeate the upper levels. The breakthrough seemed to be Ryan Gosling’s performance of I’m Just Ken, which was so bombastic and overblown that everyone screamed and cheered as if they were watching the resurrection of Beatlemania. Then, when Al Pacino stumbled on stage and presented best picture to Oppenheimer without announcing the nominees or even really the winner, everyone laughed as if they were part of it.
As the night drew to a close, the woman next to me saw her daughter on the stage. Her eyes filled with tears. By now, I was all for the normal people Oscars. It might lack the star wattage of the lower levels, but there is something beautiful and human about going through it surrounded by people who are invested in the outcome.
***
And then, when the ceremony was over, it happened: my big, meaningful celebrity encounter of the night. In the chaos of trying to leave the building, I got on the wrong escalator. Standing in front of me was a gentleman wearing a very comfy-looking pair of Nikes. But at the top of the escalator was a crowd of people who wouldn’t make way.
The man quickly realised that a pile-up might ensue. He turned to me, looked me straight in the eye and said: “This is getting really dangerous.” And that is how I had a brief but important exchange about escalator safety with Ed Begley Jr from Better Call Saul. Not the show’s star, but still …
Would this have qualified as a decent celebrity encounter had I attended the celebrity Oscars? Almost certainly not, because I would have been busy straining my neck to try to see Margot Robbie or Nicolas Cage. But I didn’t attend the celebrity Oscars. I was a proud member of the normal people Oscars – and through that prism Begley is basically Elvis Presley. Truly, it has never felt so good to be second best.
