Lights! Camera! Snack-tion!

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY MELVIN SMACK

Cameras are banned from the Oscars so the author took these in secret on his camera phone. That’s why they look like this.

As I sat in the steam room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles with a glass of cucumber water in my hand, pampering myself before the 81st Academy Awards, I wondered: What delights did the evening have in store for me?

I was in LA for the first time. A celebrity friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed, had been nominated for an Oscar. I went to give him moral support and soak up the splendor and glamour of Hollywood at the Governors Ball Oscars dinner, which is the meal served directly after the most important night in the calendar of all the douchebags who have ever made, starred in, or watched a movie.

As I walked into the ceremony, feeling nervous but also like a million dollars—like a nervous million dollars, then—I saw greats like

Lethal Weapon 3

star Danny Glover and Sean Penn from

Shanghai Surprise

. Ferris Bueller’s wife Sarah Jessica Parker waltzed past with a guy holding up the back of her ball gown so it would not touch the red carpet. Her scent wafted onto me and it was lovely. From what I could tell, the dress-holder-upper stayed with her all night, forever vigilant against SJP receiving any dust speckles on the hem of her garment.

Our host for the evening, Hugh Jackman, star of something called

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

, jauntily bounded onstage and proceeded to crack us all up with hilarious anecdotes about Hollywood and its ins ’n’ outs. I chuckled knowingly even though I am from London and Tinseltown, to me, looks like a photograph of a painting Liberace might have made while high on acid. Jackman was followed by hours and hours and hours of brilliantly heartfelt speeches by Danny Boyle, which really made me think about the problems they go through in the slums of India. The less I could feel my ass, the more I cared about sad Indian kids.

To be honest, though, all this stuff was merely delaying my main reason for coming to the Oscars and to LA itself—namely, the Governors Ball and the food they serve there after everybody’s stopped crying about how amazing everybody is.

But first, a problem: Throughout the evening, if you got up to go out during the commercial break and missed the countdown to get back to the show, they locked all the doors until the next break, and a seat-filler would sit in your place so the show wouldn’t look dead to all the hillbillies watching at home on TV.

So I went out to get a glass of water and queued for 20 minutes, only to discover it wasn’t a free bar and I had no cash on me. For the first time in Oscar history, the public water fountain was put to good use. The stars and agents of stars all around looked at me as if I were standing there scooping shit out of my ass with my bare hand and drawing on the wall with it. And then I was locked out of the awards.

After being reunited with my friend, who lost in his category to some asshole, we headed over to the dinner and sat at a very tacky-looking table. There was a band playing the kind of dinner jazz you get on gas-station compilation CDs.

I looked around and saw that Kevin Kline from

Wild Wild West

and Phoebe Cates from

Gremlins 2

were seated opposite us. Phoebe Cates, you might be interested to know, is still 100 percent wank-worthy. One guy complained to himself about the food because he was on a no-carb diet. He was upset with the caviar-and-smoked-salmon pizza appetizer. I once read that the cast of

The Breakfast Club

lived on caviar pizzas so I was excited to try it. I have to say that I was a little underwhelmed.

Sadly, the caviar pizza was easily the best part of dinner. The next two courses were something I will eloquently describe as “weird thin salty soup” followed by “nasty kebab meat with rice.” I’ve had better food served to me by an angry Turk in Piccadilly Circus at 2 AM.

For dessert, I got an edible Oscar statue on top of a chocolate box with chocolates inside. I bit the head off thinking it would be delicious 99-percent cocoa solids, but to my surprise it tasted like a brown Crayola.

Disheartened and still hungry, we made plans to fuck off back to the hotel. Then we entered the main ballroom and stumbled upon a room full of lavish, edible wonders. It was like the scene in

Wizard of Oz

where she pushes open the door and it’s all in Technicolor and there are hundreds of gaily clad dwarves prancing around.

There were Oscar cookies, a chocolate fountain with strawberries, chocolate mousse, a mountain of shellfish, and two hills of sushi with giant balls of wasabi paste and slimy slivers of the ginger you get in every Japanese restaurant in the world. I’m British, so sushi to me is still a big deal.

Then my pal revealed we had tickets to the

Vanity Fair

party, which, as the history books show, is surely one of the most decadent and wonderful of all post-Oscar private afterparties. I heard someone once even did some cocaine in the bathroom after drinking a glass of real champagne there.

But within five minutes of entering, Mickey Rourke from

FTW

had left the building. Then we saw Elton John from

Bob the Builder: A Christmas to Remember

sulking in a corner while Ben Stiller from

The Ben Stiller Show

told what looked like a hilarious anecdote to a bunch of agents with tanned, muscled faces. I heard a rumor that the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, was letting a bunch of actors gangbang his mouth with their cocks in the VIP area (metaphorically), but I couldn’t get past the velvet rope.

As you all know, each month’s issue of

Vanity Fair

is like a who’s who of who’s hot on the A-list of obscenely rich assholes, so we expected pyramids of free iPods and Aqua di Parma. But no, all we found was a dumpy girl holding a cardboard box of In-N-Out burgers.

“Take a cheeseburger, sir,” she commanded me.

I took one and slurred “Thanksh” because by then I was quite drunk.

I took a bite and the room swirled around me.

I felt like I was the star of my own movie, so completely did the sensation of this snack encapsulate my evening.

“Oh, Burger!” I wept. “You look beautiful tonight. But you are cold, soggy, and completely tasteless.”

Then I turned into a pumpkin or something.