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Monday, March 27, 2000
LOS ANGELES -- Hours before every black limousine in the world rolled down Jefferson Avenue, some of them longer than "The Green Mile," the secured area around the Shrine Auditorium had long since become a throbbing scene of officious chaos.
So there was no way for Zan Overall, a 73-year-old musician/demonstrator from Van Nuys, to know that he was standing near the wrong entrance and, never having been to the Oscars before, that his protest sign was probably too small.
"Academy Awards," it said, "Propaganda Disguised as Entertainment."
It also included ripping one-sentence indictments on each of the nominated films, but those were definitely printed too small.
"It's not that I think Hollywood has an agenda, they don't need an agenda, like the Mob doesn't need an agenda when it goes out to kill somebody," Overall said. "But they are clearly on the left and they promote things the left wants promoted. I'm on the right."
Left or right, Zan was in the wrong place at the right time.
There are more than 5,300 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it appeared every last one of them was milling about fashionably on or near the red carpet. And, of course, on the phone.
They were now and again infiltrated by platoons of uniformed functionaries, such as the all-female red-vested limo greeters and the all-male white-smocked food service team, one of whom toted a box of clear plastic Purity Wrap, you would suppose in the event Jack Nicholson wanted to wrap up a sandwich to take home.
Eventually a woman in a black dress and a camerman walked down the carpet to determine whether they could get the crowd fired up. This seemed a needless mission, since the bleachers were filled largely with Americans, and if there's one thing you can count on in this culture, it's that people will appear really excited when you point a TV camera at them. Because, mostly, they are.
When it was almost time for the stars to start arriving -- not the big ones, Kevin Spacey probably hadn't even taken a shower yet -- it had begun to become evident just who was who among the real people by their relative location. Generally, the proclivity of any particular individual to engage in idolatry outside these 72nd annual Academy Awards was directly proportional to their proximity to the red carpet.
The closest, in the first row of the bleachers, were a half dozen people wearing red "bleacher creature" T-shirts. These were the folks who began camping here a week ago, only to be shooed by authorities. Something about an ordinance like, no camping in a school zone night after night just to get a look at Meryl Streep. They were given bleacher tickets and told to come back on the weekend, and they turned out in full throated support of everyone who even looked like they might be anyone, including Joan Rivers, who, by the way, got sliced in the Los Angeles Times for being the inventor of the Take Your Daughter To Work And Just Keep Her There program.
But out on the street, not everybody in a crowd that was eight-deep behind police barriers had come to praise Oscar, but rather to harry him. Chicanos demonstrated from a the position closest to the limo arrivals, carrying placards urging "More Chicanos On TV And In The Movies!"
Up Jefferson maybe 50 yards, "The Cider House Rules," an understated abortion rights film nominated for best picture, was being scalded by pro-life activists with their large, graphic pictures of aborted fetuses. "Cider House Reeks" read a large sign.
Around the block on 32nd Street though, Zan remained the man farthest from Oscar idolatry.
"Look at the films this year," he said evenly. " 'American Beauty.' The villain is a retired military officer, retired honorably I presume, and he is so despondent over a brief homosexual advance that he winds up killing his neighbor, while the hero is someone who drops out of the American system and smokes marijuana with a young neighbor boy, who is a dealer.
"And that has a chance to win the Academy Award! I mean, I am the only one this bothers?"