It’s Oscar® Week and that means I’m the Media Guy by day and the Oscars Guy by night. Before I let you know about the happenings this week in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, I want to say that I’m pretty moved that Saturday Night Live picked up on my outrage over the pandering of the Super Bowl LI sponsors and parodied it:

So what does Oscar Week mean? It means a lot of nights in Beverly Hills at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater leading up to the red carpet madness on Sunday. The rare chance to dive into the minds of filmmakers and producers is at the forefront with the excellent symposiums that the Academy of Arts and Sciences allows access to folks like me on the five days leading up to the telecast.

The lineup is beyond hyperbole, but rest assured, it is amazing:

Last night – SHORTS: ANIMATED AND LIVE ACTION, hosted by Dead Pool director Tim Miller. More on this one on other media outlets (yes, I’ll post links), but Miller was the best symposium host in the six years I have been going to Oscar Week events. He was honest, funny, intelligent and obviously channeling his inner Dead Pool. All I can say is I want more of Tim Miller movies. Like now.

Tonight – DOCUMENTARIES, hosted by Documentary Branch Governors Kate Amend and Rory Kennedy

Thursday – ANIMATED FEATURES, hosted by Pete Docter (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Up, writer) and Jonas Rivera (Inside Out and Up Producer)

Saturday – FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS

Also Saturday – MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING SYMPOSIUM

For those of you that care about such things, I will do my darnedest to get my Annual Backstage at the Oscars column up fast on Sunday night. That’s always a tricky proposition to transcribe the winners’ speeches and fact check it all. Traditionally, these are among the most read columns of the year and this year was no different with the 2016 column still in the top three as I write this. In case you missed any, here are the previous five Backstage columns:

Usually I wait for the Sidebars about the Oscars, but I thought you should be prepared earlier, rather than later. Without further ado…

Uncle Oscar always looks so good!

• With 14 nominations, La La Land ties the record held by All about Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997).
• With their Best Picture nominations for Moonlight, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner become the first individual producers to have nominations in the Best Picture category in four consecutive years.
• La La Land is the first musical with original music and story to receive a Best Picture nomination since All That Jazz (1979) and the second since Anchors Aweigh (1945).
• With his Best Picture nomination for Manchester by the Sea, Matt Damon becomes only the third individual to be nominated in the Acting, Writing and Best Picture categories. The others are Warren Beatty and George Clooney.
• Denzel Washington is the seventh individual to receive Acting and Best Picture nominations for the same film, joining Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper.
• In the acting categories, seven individuals are first-time nominees (Andrew Garfield, Mahershala Ali, Lucas Hedges, Dev Patel,
• Isabelle Huppert, Ruth Negga and Naomie Harris). Six of the nominees are previous acting winners (Denzel Washington, Jeff Bridges, Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Octavia Spencer).
• Meryl Streep extends her lead as the most nominated performer with her 20th nomination.
• Kubo and the Two Strings is the second fully animated film to be nominated in the Visual Effects category. The first was The Nightmare before Christmas (1993).
• With a running time of 7 hours 47 minutes, Documentary Feature nominee O.J.: Made in America is the longest film ever nominated for an Academy Award.
• Mica Levi, nominated for Original Score for Jackie, is the eighth woman to be nominated in the music scoring categories.
• Thomas Newman’s nomination for Original Score for Passengers is his 14th and brings the total for members of the Newman family (Alfred, Lionel, Emil, Thomas, David and Randy) to 90, more than any other family.
• Stuart Craig has the most nominations for Production Design of any living person with 11. The all-time record in the category belongs to Cedric Gibbons with 38 nominations.
• Kevin O’Connell and Andy Nelson, each with 21 nominations for Sound Mixing, are tied for the most nominations in the category since nominations began going to individuals in 1961.
• With their nomination for Sound Editing for La La Land, Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Iatrou Morgan become the first female team to be nominated in the category. Six other women have a combined total of 10 nominations and five wins for Sound Editing.
• Kim Magnusson, with his sixth nomination for Live Action Short Film, has produced the most films nominated in the short film categories of any living person.
• “The Empty Chair” from Jim: The James Foley Story is the seventh song from a documentary feature to be nominated and the fifth in the past five years.

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Last one from this year’s Oscars (I promise)…here’s a little story I did that was picked up nationally…

Leo wins the big one.

The Oscars take an awards ceremony and elevates it to a level that all other events can only dream of; at least on television. More people watch television than go to movies, especially now with movie prices nearing twenty dollars. The levels of fashion, the A-listers, and the venue all combine to deliver nearly a billion sets of eyeballs to the ABC telecast of the show. Here we go backstage and show you the life of a reporter behind the scenes.

The 88th Academy Awards telecast was a unique experience from the get-go because of the entire diversity / #OscarsSoWhite issue that plagued the usual positive vibe that the promise of a golden, 8.5 pound, 24K statuette will usually deliver. The tone started on the unusually muted tone of the red carpet and continued all night. The diversity issued was imbued throughout the evening and into the press room.

Host Chris Rock

All of the reporters that were in attendance were literally on the edge of our seats. We simply didn’t know where the issue was going to take us. Oscars telecast host, Chris Rock, made no public statement after the controversy broke out and stayed silent all the way through to curtains up on the telecast. The controversy heightened on the speculation he was going to address it, gloss over it, or maybe make a serious statement and move on. Turns out, he hit the ground running and it was a full throttle assault on the controversy…

• “Man, I counted at least 15 black people on that montage. I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.”
• “This is the wildest, craziest Oscars to ever host, because we’ve got all this controversy. No, no black nominees, you know, and people are like ‘Chris, you should boycott. Chris, you should quit. You should quit.’ How come there’s only unemployed people that tell you to quit something, you know? No one with a job ever tells you to quit.”
• “It’s the 88th Academy Awards. It’s the 88th Academy Awards, which means this whole no black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. O.K.?”
• “…in the 50s, in the 60s … we had real things to protest at the time, you know? We had real things to protest; you know, we’re too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer. You know, when your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.”
• …and on he went, a 14-minute monologue and every word had to do with diversity.

There was a very tangible impact from the controversy that spread to the media room. Backstage, there were more African-American reporters in the press corps than we had ever seen. Most were from outlets we had never heard of, or had ever attended an Academy Awards.

From the minute the issue became a controversy, the Academy was very self-conscious and that was evident from what we saw last night. They bent over backwards to admit there was a problem. They took blame for it, saying collectively, “Yes, there is a problem and we plan to do something about it. We are going to change things.”

Eddie Redmayne and Cheryl Boone Isaacs

Indeed, President of the Academy Board of Governors, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, said, “…there’s a brand new world coming…”  alluding to their four-year plan to double the minorities in the voting members contingency and the Board of Governors.

Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, and Academy President, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, on the red carpet.
The telecast took shots at themselves during the telecast. Some of the nominated films for Best Picture were altered via CGI to insert black actors into the films’ lead roles. In the media room, there were laughs, but after a while their was a backlash and complaints that the Academy was too over the top, where it was actually making fun of the controversy. Ah, sometimes there is no winning.

As soon as we exhaled, the moans started coming about the political pontifications of the show:

Kerry Washington and Henry Cavill backstage.

Best Costume Design winner Jenny Beavan championed for environmental water issues during her acceptance speech. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but actually it could be horribly prophetic, Mad Max, if we’re not kinder to each other, and if we don’t stop polluting our atmosphere, so you know, it could happen.”

Adam McKay, winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Big Short at the took the opportunity to warn voters of candidates who take money from questionable places, including “weirdo billionaires,” during his acceptance speech. His movie, a financial dramedy that warns against big banks and corrupt financial systems. McKay continued, “Most of all, if you don’t want big money to control government, don’t vote for candidates that take money from big banks, oil or weirdo billionaires: Stop!”

Even Leonardo DiCaprio jumped on his soapbox to discuss global warming.

Backstage McKay was asked if  he had someone in mind during his speech and he replied, “No, I was speaking about both parties.” He elaborated in detail about the big corporations, the banks and the problems with America to the point where the press covering it tuned out to the point where they were murmuring about their wishes that people would go back to just thanking their agents and their families.

(Let’s face it, reporters are complainers at heart.)

One of the fun skits of the night turned out to be the Girl Scout fundraising. Rock spun a nice storyline where his daughters are always finishing second to another parent’s troop. To make up for that, he asked to millionaires in the audience to pony up and help the girls sell more cookies. And sell they did, to the tune of $65,000 plus raised.

$65k to the Girl Scouts!

But backstage there were more under-the-breath whispers asking, “where’s Hispanic Girl Scouts, or the Asian troop? We have the African-American girl scouts out there, so where are rest of the ethnic groups.” In effect from there, it was a collective griping session about what kind of diversity was need. The claws were out on the press corps looking for anything to poke holes into the efforts of healing. So in case you missed it, there is no winning in the press room.

Sam Smith’s grossly inaccurate Oscars acceptance speech (for Best Original Song) produced a profanity-laced tirade that was directed loudly and inward towards himself as the press corps called him out. Many scurried to the buffet served by Wolfgang Puck.

If you found the time, the food in the press room is Beverly Hills chic; and that’s an understatement. On the menu: spring rolls, assorted sandwiches with artisan bread and pretzel rolls, pesto bow-tie pasta, shrimp cocktail, rigatoni, with marinara sauce, beef and chicken empanadas, grilled chicken skewers rolled in sesame seeds, beff skewers, assorted meats including peperoni, capicola, mortadella, and salami, cheeses, assorted nuts, dried fruits, and a dessert table with four different cakes, cookies, and fresh fruit.

There was Oscar-shaped salmon with caviar at the Governor’s Ball.

Hey, where’s Jada? Protests outside the Oscars.

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