The Oscars are like dividend statements from Bernie Madoff. You know they’re coming, you expect the worst, but you open the envelopes anyway, with your fingers crossed, hoping this year will be better. It never is, but despite rock-bottom ratings, and dwindling interest in too many nominees nobody ever heard of, too many categories nobody cares about and too many movies nobody wants to see, the people who put on this annual clambake never stop trying.

The grim previews of the 81st Academy Awards show on Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theatre, designed by David Rockwell—the modern-day Rube Goldberg responsible for the Mohegan Sun Indian casino, the ugly sets for Hairspray and the Jet Blue terminal at J.

The Oscars are like dividend statements from Bernie Madoff. You know they’re coming, you expect the worst, but you open the envelopes anyway, with your fingers crossed, hoping this year will be better. It never is, but despite rock-bottom ratings, and dwindling interest in too many nominees nobody ever heard of, too many categories nobody cares about and too many movies nobody wants to see, the people who put on this annual clambake never stop trying.

The grim previews of the 81st Academy Awards show on Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theatre, designed by David Rockwell—the modern-day Rube Goldberg responsible for the Mohegan Sun Indian casino, the ugly sets for Hairspray and the Jet Blue terminal at J.F.K.—are already being described as “community theater on steroids,” and include a curtain made of 92,000 crystals, a thrust stage requiring an orthopedic surgeon in residence for presenters in stiletto heels, 20 monumental Art Deco arches, the removal of the traditional orchestra pit, lights filtered through silver-rope curtains and strands of silver-leaf balls, 19 screens flying through space and fluted chandeliers floating above the audience, all dominated by the color blue. It sounds like a vulgar stage show in Atlantic City starring Siegfried and Roy, designed to turn passionate movie lovers into dyspeptic movie critics—only a handful of whom will still be awake by the time the five final (and only important) prizes of the night are announced. Gone are the days of Cary Grant, Garland and Garbo (none of whom won an Oscar). Today we get J.Lo and Meatloaf. It’s all banana oil anyway. Any industry that pins a Best Film label on a brainless, boring cornball like Around the World in 80 Days over a timeless masterpiece like George Stevens’ Giant obviously cannot be taken seriously. But, eternal masochist that I am, I’ll be watching again on Sunday—hopefully, in pajamas.

>>Rex Reed assesses this year's nominees

After a lifetime of surviving this bloated, backslapping office picnic in every venue from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to Elaine’s, I am here to tell you pajamas and pizza is still the best way. Since the Oscars turned into an electronic monster, it’s the only way. (Maybe it always was. Joseph L. Mankiewicz once told me, “The Oscars have always been an awful, disorganized mess. The first year I went, it was a small dinner party at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel that went on half the night; Jackie Coogan fell asleep in Marie Dressler’s lap, and the emcee suggested every man in the room stand up and thank his own wife.”) The year I went with Angela Lansbury, who stopped the show cold riding in from the top of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on a camera dolly singing “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” I was treated like a rajah. The years I attended as a working journalist, I was treated like the rajah’s donkey. Either way—as an invited guest with an aisle seat, or as a lowly member of the press shoved into a rodeo chute backstage—I couldn’t see a thing. It’s a television show, not a theatrical event; the cameras block every view; and you are better off in bed. I no longer remember who won what in any given year, but my memories of the rotten, boring and humorless chaos of these circuses are as vivid as those of the circus elephants. I still have my program from 1968, soiled with coffee stains that happened when I got shoved into the coffee urn backstage, where more photographers and press agents than you could beat off with a stick chased Rod Steiger—who was shouting “I gotta get outta here!”—out of the auditorium.

 

AH, YES. Like Chevalier in Gigi, I remember it well. The powerful New York Times critic Bosley Crowther arrived with no studio limo to meet him, rented a Hertz at the airport, drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel where his room had been given away and ended up sitting on top of his luggage at 3 a.m., searching for a place to sleep. (It’s not nice to pan Bonnie and Clyde.) Three hundred stretch limos were locked in a lethal traffic jam so tangled that Warren Beatty and Audrey Hepburn left their cars and walked, dodging what looked like several thousand screaming teenyboppers in madras Bermuda shorts led by head cheerleader Army Archerd, a columnist perched on a platform conducting interviews like a third-rate sideshow barker, in a ritual predating Joan Rivers’ red carpet. “And here she is, folks, stepping up to the stand, a nominee for Barefoot in the Park, Miss Natalie Chadwick!” The great Mildred Natwick promptly looked sick, but she was too much of a lady to punch him in the nose. “It’s Mildred Natwick,” she sniffed coolly. “And how many Oscars does this make for you?” “Well, none actually …” “Thank you very much, Miss Catwick …”

They were coming fast and furious. Natalie Wood. (“I know why I won’t see you up there getting an Oscar, Natalie, it’s because you didn’t make a picture at all this year, har-har.”) Danny Kaye. Edith Head. Sonny, in a sequin taffeta Cossack suit, and Cher, looking like an Egyptian slave girl in an old Maria Montez movie. There was something wet in her navel that bounced off the kliegs. Don’t ask.

No Davis, Crawford or Stanwyck. Just that great American motion picture star Phyllis Diller, in red ostrich plumes sticking out of a chinchilla dress. (“It’s a Brillo pad, stretched.”) George Cukor and Stanley Kramer were disposed of fast—no glamour, folks!—to make way for … yes, it was she … in person … Annette Funicello! Baby Annette! Wearing a hideous banana split nightmare by, if you’ll pardon the expression, Mr. Blackwell!

Lined up like prize cows, Ann Miller, Greer Garson (who forced a change in the rules the year her acceptance speech for Mrs. Miniver clocked in at 40 minutes), Martha Raye in monkey fur thanking General Westmoreland (huh?), men in cowboy hats, Julie Christie and Dustin Hoffman with Senator Eugene McCarthy’s daughter, Ellen, stepped on hemlines and tripped on tuxedo spats while Mrs. Gregory Peck in a lime sherbet Yves St. Laurent (“Yes sir, he’s really great, that Yves,” hollered Army) steered her liberal left-wing husband away from wooden, right-wing conservative Charlton Heston, observing, “He looks like an armoire.” And all the time, the sun was shining! By the time legendary Dame Edith Evans, 80, practically got knocked to the ground by a gang of La-La’s hungriest paparazzi (“You wanna snap her?” “Who is she?” “Dame somebody”), I had seen enough of Hollywood before dark, and become unswerving in my belief that one should never again attend one of these clambakes in broad daylight unless heavily veiled.

Inside, stars, fans and freeloaders pushed, shoved and sweated their way into an illuminated grotto lit by 153 klieg lights with a blast of heat that made you feel like you were being fried to death like extras in Lawrence of Arabia. The curtain rose, in a roar of applause, revealing chandeliers, potted palms and plastic Sears Roebuck flower arrangements, with more gold paint on the walls than on the Oscars themselves, which in those days cost $60 apiece. Actors on the dole used to hock them, which is now illegal, but the Academy will buy them back for $10. They make good doorstops. Claudette Colbert kept hers in the bar in Barbados and used it to crack walnuts.

In the mausoleumlike indifference that followed, Bob Hope bombed; the great Louis Armstrong did a stupid song with a stuffed elephant in total silence because the mikes went dead; stage hands in blue jeans walked across the stage to hand Hope a hand mike because his lectern was stuck in the floor, but the cord wasn’t long enough so he had to kneel on the floor with Diahann Carroll to be heard. Then they were too low to read the cue cards. For the “best explosions, fires, earthquakes or hurricanes,” Natalie Wood gave the Special Visual Effects award to Doctor Dolittle, a film with no explosions, fires, earthquakes or hurricanes. By the time Sidney Poitier presented the Best Actress award to Katharine Hepburn, who didn’t show up, so many yawning people were heading for the exits that there was more speculation about who was going to what party than there was about the Oscars.

In those days, the most glamorous and coveted invites were to über-agent Swifty Lazar’s annual fete at Spago, where the Minnellis, Rosalind Russell, Cyd Charisse, Audrey Hepburn, Billy Wilder, the Goldwyns, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Joe Mankiewicz, Irwin Shaw and Claudette Colbert pigged out on caviar and Dom. The Bonnie and Clyde brigade saddled off to Kenneth Hyman’s to get drunk, and when somebody asked Supporting Actress winner Estelle Parsons why the movie didn’t win more prizes, she said candidly, “I guess because nobody likes Warren Beatty.” The rest of the action ended up at the popular watering hole the Factory, where Raquel Welch, Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford, Kevin McCarthy and Elke Sommer were all eclipsed by Angela Lansbury in a braless floor-length white satin Harlow dress, and by Carol Channing, who ate her own organic peaches from a Mason jar because she thought she had been poisoned by the bleach in her hair, wearing a beaded rhinestone turtleneck sunshine-yellow jumper coat and grinning widely. “I can’t dance, because my dress weighs 36 pounds and I fall down when I stand up.”

It was all over at 4 a.m., when Dame Edith Evans threw down her menu after two sips of that chlorinated Los Angeles water that tastes like Geritol, stuck her fingers in her ears to drown out the noise, marched grandly toward the elevator, fed up with Oscar and his bogus one-night Camelot, and went home for a bowl of cornflakes.

 

I VOWED I had learned my lesson, but like flu shots, every year I come back for more. Nineteen seventy-two was nothing to be proud of. I almost gave up on the whole sorry debacle when the entertaining but simple-minded French Connection, a typical action-genre movie with one good chase scene, won Best Picture in a year that produced A Clockwork Orange, Carnal Knowledge, Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Last Picture Show. And how else do you explain Gene Hackman as Best Actor? Bogart, Cagney, Widmark, Edward G. Robinson … the list of actors who never won Oscars for playing tough cops is endless. To single Hackman out for Best Actor over Peter Finch or Malcolm McDowell (who wasn’t even nominated!) was simply ludicrous. And so it was with the forgotten Nicholas and Alexandra winning Best Costume because of a lot of fur hats; William Friedkin winning Best Director, because he staged a subway crash, over Stanley Kubrick, whose work elevated the medium to the front ranks of artistic achievement. The musical numbers were uniformly loathsome, especially the gruesome, trashy music from Shaft, which turned the stage into a holocaust of sweaty confusion, with people stepping on each other in an explosion of pink smoke, like open warfare in a Harlem powder room.

In 1972, the disintegration of Hollywood began. Even in years when merit was ignored in favor of guilt (Elizabeth Taylor won for Butterfield 8, one of her worst films, because she almost died that year, and told the press,“I still think it stinks!”; and at the end of his career, John Wayne won an Oscar for falling off a horse!), you could count on glamour. Instead of Loretta Young, Esther Williams or Cary Grant, 1972 was the year we were saddled with Joe Namath, Jill St. John, Timothy Bottoms and Joey Heatherton. It was also the year Charlie Chaplin was finally honored with a Lifetime Achievement award, a tribute to his genius, on a stage crowded with some of the tackiest people in show business. Why didn’t someone have the intelligence to ask Jackie Coogan to once again don his cap from The Kid and make the presentation? He was in the audience, unidentified. Then to crudely shove a hat and cane at Chaplin (which he dropped), flash credits for Shell Oil and Cool Whip across his face in his moment of triumph, then desert him onstage surrounded by women who looked like Times Square hookers was vulgar, mindless and stupid.

Nineteen seventy-three: I was there when the Oscars got scalped. Marlon Brando, who should have won for A Streetcar Named Desire, got an undeserved Best Actor consolation prize for The Godfather, a film in which the star was Al Pacino, not Brando. Everyone booed when a pretty Apache named Sacheen Littlefeather walked onstage and announced Brando’s refusal to accept, citing the film industry’s barbaric treatment of Indians, “especially with the recent happenings at Wounded Knee.” Quel crap. Sacheen turned out to be an actress named Maria Cruz, who had once been crowned “Miss American Vampire of 1970,” and I wonder what, to this day, the Indians at Wounded Knee ever did with an ugly doorstop.

It was the year for kicking the shins of overpublicized Swedish import Liv Ullmann after her American debut in the catastrophic Lost Horizon, and Bette Midler dined out on it: “I call it ‘Lost-Her Reason.’ I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical!” The nominated songs were a love song about a rat called Ben, a love song about an ark, a love song about a bear, a love song about the S.S. Poseidon and a love song from a movie nobody ever heard of called The Stepmother—proving at last that this is a category that should be eliminated by default. Raquel Welch was nearly assaulted at the exit by Jesus freaks shouting, “Repent now or die!” All was not lost. Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Bob Fosse all won for Cabaret and headed back to New York, followed by Best Supporting Actress Eileen Heckart, who went straight to the unemployment office near her home in Connecticut, where she got a standing ovation. “I’m very well known there,” she told me.

Like weddings, divorces and firstborn children, Oscars take on a special significance for dedicated movie buffs. Depending on who won and what happened, I can tell you where I was on almost every Oscar night. I was there in 1974, when a dull year was enlivened by Best Actress Glenda Jackson’s caustic appraisal (“I felt disgusted … as though I were attending a public hanging”) and by a 33-year-old sex shop proprietor named Robert Opel, who got his five minutes of fame when he sneaked backstage with a phony press pass, stripped stark naked and streaked across the stage in the middle of David Niven’s introduction of Elizabeth Taylor. Viewers at home were spared the details, but anyone who got a firsthand view, genitals and all, will tell you it was no big deal.

I was there again the year noisy protestors surrounded the Los Angeles Music Center with rude signs screaming “A vote for Jane Fonda is a vote for the Viet Cong!” (She won anyway, for Coming Home, and for proving she was right about Nixon.) Some dignity at last, with traffic control by Jack Haley Jr. Old film clips to introduce Ruby Keeler and Laurence Olivier worked, Johnny Carson replaced Bob Hope, the girls looked like real people instead of Zoroastrian zombies, but very few presenters could tell the difference between Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. A lot of folks in Hollywood thought they were the same movie; it’s like Bel Air trying to explain Vietnam to Beverly Hills. Once again, you needed a stomach emulsifier to get through the songs. Debby Boone singing “The Magic of Lassie”? Were they kidding? Why did 350 million viewers in 54 countries tune in? Same reason they tune in today. To see big stars. Instead they got Telly Savalas, Paul Williams and Margot Kidder. There was a full moon that night, which may explain why Barry Manilow, wearing more pancake than Carol Lynley, looked like Dracula.

 

NINETEEN EIGHTY: Felled by a bad back, I watched it in bed, fortified by Demerol. The only way, really. Johnny Carson got his only laughs when he introduced Jack Valenti as the man who “filled the charisma void left by Conrad Nagel” and congratulated 8-year-old Justin Henry from Kramer vs. Kramer for being “the only actor in Hollywood not mentioned in Britt Ekland’s memoirs.” Ann Miller’s famous wig must have been on a plane from New York that didn’t land on time. Instead, she came as herself and Miss Piggy came as Ann Miller. When the song category is stolen by Kermit the Frog, you know you’re in trouble. Melissa Manchester sounded like a singing telegram and looked like an army of mice had spent the winter in her hair.

I recovered. The A-list Oscar party in the West was still Swifty and Mary Lazar’s, but by the 1980s everybody who was anybody in the Apple convened at Polly Bergen’s Park Avenue apartment for lavish food, ballot voting and a hefty prize that for some odd reason was always won by David Susskind. In 1981, the 53rd Academy Awards was postponed 24 hours because of he assassination attempt on President Reagan, which prompted a lot of jokes about the industry getting even for Bedtime for Bonzo. I watched on Polly’s bed, propped up on pillows between Paul Newman, who applauded an honorary award to Henry Fonda, and Lucille Ball, who threw popcorn at the TV screen when poor Lily Tomlin was forced to present an award to a machine called the “optic blender,” which Lucy swore had only won after a stiff competition from the Waring blender. When “Fame” won for best song, Milton Berle yelled, “That’s not a song that needs a singer! It’s a traffic collision that needs a paramedic!”

Nineteen eighty-two. Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Gay Talese, Helen Gurley Brown, Nora Ephron, A. E. Hotchner, Myrna Loy, Raquel Welch and horror film icon Barbara Steele were just some of the swells munching enchiladas at Polly’s Oscar-night Mexican fiesta and applauding Chariots of Fire. Fewer blunders, bloopers and boo-boos, a wiser use of clips showing such departed greats as Mae West, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Liberace’s new face looked like Marjorie Main’s old one. As always, the nominated songs should have been diverted to the nearest trash compactor. A special tribute to the fabulous songs of composer Harry Warren was so badly conceived that Alice Faye, for whom Warren composed his most enduring screen hits, walked off the show during the afternoon rehearsal when she heard Debbie Allen massacre her own historic song “You’ll Never Know” in a key the songwriter never heard of. But true positive energy arrived two hours into the show, when out walked Barbara Stanwyck, who got the only standing ovation of the night. People always ask for definitions of what makes a real star. It’s an undefinable something extra I identify as “presence,” and Stanwyck took over the stage that year with so much of it that the place seemed momentarily radioactive.

 

AND SO IT GOES, through the years. Call me yesterday’s child, but after the thrill of Doris Day arm in arm with Clark Gable, or Mae West’s carnal gibes at Rock Hudson on a raunchy duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” that almost knocked the show off the air in 1958, the sight of Charlie Kaufman and a coven of assorted Desperate Housewives just doesn’t quite make it. I still think Judy Garland should have won for the achievement of a lifetime in A Star Is Born (1954), instead of dreary Grace Kelly. I remain unconvinced that Judy Holliday should have won in 1951 for Born Yesterday over Bette Davis in All About Eve. How can a sane mind explain how The Greatest Show on Earth beat out The Bad and the Beautiful in 1953? Orson Welles never really won anything; neither did Alfred Hitchcock. James Dean changed the face of movie acting forever, but Oscar gave him the middle finger twice—posthumously, too. Kim Stanley, my favorite actress of all time, wasn’t even nominated for The Goddess. Already disheartened, I pretty much stopped covering the Oscars on a regular basis after Titanic swept the awards in 1998, and for no logical reason, a silly, spastic fop named Roberto Benigni beat Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan the following year. When it comes to grousing, I’m just scratching the surface. It all reminds me of what Hunter Thompson once said about the music business: “A dark, plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free, and good men die like dogs. … There is also a negative side.”

The winds of change have now reached gale force, but here we go again. The songs have been a joke since real songwriters stopped writing them. The last great song with any legs written for the screen was “New York, New York” in 1977. It wasn’t even nominated. In the old days you got musical numbers by Kern, Berlin and the Gershwins. Now you get X-rated rap about pimps. Aware of the negative impact this trash has provoked, the Academy this year is limiting the category to three songs instead of five, and the performance time to one chorus each. No cigar, but it’s a start.

Academy membership is more diverse, the old guard is dying off, a younger crowd is taking over. Which explains why this is the year of the underdog. I like Slumdog Millionaire, the little movie that could, but it’s not on the same planet as Benjamin Button, The Reader or Revolutionary Road (which wasn’t even nominated). Sean Penn will most likely win for Milk, a respectable but otherwise unexceptional biopic without a shred of conflict or narrative tempo. But he didn’t face half the challenge of Brad Pitt or give half the performance of Mickey Rourke. I’m rooting for Kate Winslet, but what happened to Cate Blanchett? Can anyone explain the screenplay nomination for Frozen River, a tiny little movie full of long pauses and big mumbles? Tant pis. If there’s one thing five decades of trying to figure out the Oscars has taught me, it’s how to surrender gracefully.

Which is why I can still smile ruefully when I remember the Oscar night in 1994 at the Russian Tea Room when a talented but clueless young puppy named Leonardo DiCaprio, who had never heard of Gentleman’s Agreement, asked Celeste Holm, “And what is it you do?”

rreed@observer.com