Handled With Care: Oscar's Celebrities Walk the Red Carpet

HOLLYWOOD, March 5

Seductive plush pile, the color of rare filet -- it's a carpet no sane person would ever install in a house but everyone has secret dreams of traversing. They're cleaning Hollywood Boulevard late Sunday morning one more time with a steam vac before everyone arrives, a nicely surreal thing to see, which is, of course, shown on television.

You know it's hard out here for a red-carpet pimp. There's the waiting, the jostling, the noise and the sight of Wolfgang Puck taking a shortcut behind the bleachers followed by his young minions carrying chocolate Oscars on trays -- one of which is almost knocked over by a woman exiting a Port-a-Potty. Slowly it gets more glam than that: The people shouting "Keira! Keira!" to the nominated Knightley like a variety of birds trapped in a cheap zoo. But mostly there's this desperation. Or maybe it's the inferiority.

Dozens of very famous people walk past you, guided by their minders, and many of them stop, and you realize -- once you have their beneficent attention, once you make eye contact and confirm there really is such a thing as a Rachel Weisz, the soon-to-be Oscar winner wearing a Narciso Rodriguez (and bringing him along with her, just in case) -- that there is nothing to say to Rachel Weisz and nothing for Rachel Weisz to say back, nothing new anyhow.

"When you're pregnant you want to feel comfy, and this," Weisz says -- motioning along her black gown with tiny pleats across her breasts down to her very fashionable bump -- "felt really, really comfortable."

The actresses always say the dresses feel fabulous. You barely get these quotes down, because you get distracted by the little things -- the makeup on their breasts, for example. The way their teeth look.

At first it's the horrible feeling that everything really is fake; then you realize the true problem of red-carpet relations: Everything is too real. You're better off having it beamed in.

"What is this [hedge]? They're creepy," Supporting Actor nominee Paul Giamatti says, stopping by to make small talk with our little gaggle of reporters, fingering a leaf of the knee-high barrier that separates us from him. "I'm thinking about putting a hedge up in my house, so I won't feel lonely."

We ask the nominees what's it like to be on that side.

Gorgeous Supporting Actress nominee Amy Adams, with luminous blue-green eyes, stops for a nanosecond to think about that, and her publicist senses that this is worthless talk, and is grabbing Adams's arm and she begins to vanish from us: "It feels busy," she screams, and poof, she's gone.

Best Actor nominee David Strathairn fumbles for a way to describe it, very un-Edward Murrow-like: "Everything I start to say, every image I think of about what it's like to be here, to be out here this way, as soon as I think of some way to describe it, it's gone. Maybe like a math fraction -- it's an 'x' over 'amazing.' "

Writer Larry McMurtry, nominated for his work on "Brokeback Mountain's" screenplay, wearing a tuxedo from the waist up and jeans and cowboy boots from the waist down (this is a very old Texas style), says he's glad the awards season, and his time on the carpet, is nearly over. "I'm not cut out for this life," he says.

Jordan Houston (aka Juicy J) is, on the other hand, very cut out for the life, showing off his two bejeweled watches and his new mouth grillz. He's up for Best Original Song for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." Ludacris, following close behind, pronounces this a historical moment -- from here on out, he says, Oscar will always be about hip-hop -- songs, acting, the works. "People have been waiting for this all their lives," he says.

Here is George Clooney, and it seems to be his job to show everyone how it's done. He's never come to the Academy Awards before and he claims to own only one tux, an Armani, and he's worn it to everything else for a decade. He emerges out of the arrival tent and immediately bounds over to the fan-filled bleachers , followed closely by one of his biggest fans, Dolly Parton, who is dressed in a Glinda-the-Good-Witch pink. He signs autographs, then hops the velvet rope to come over the hedge and talk to reporters, ever a gracious hunk of ham.

But it's hunk traffic jam here: Heath Ledger, Eric Bana. Clooney gets in between them, and you don't know which one to admire. (Ledger or Clooney or Bana -- discuss.) Ledger, a Best Actor nominee, and Michelle Williams, his co-star on- and off-screen who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, whisper all their answers. We don't get a word. They're one of those "quiet" couples you see on the Metro -- you want to eavesdrop, but it's all soft, shy mumbles, even into microphones.

They're all predictably thrilled, prepped, dressed, posed. They're all tiny but somehow huge. They toss little standard vignettes about their moods, their day. They smile, and you smile. All you remember from those few seconds, all you really have, is some small and useless detail rendered huge in your mind: the blue vein barely noticeable on Meryl Streep's cheek, or a glimpse at her dental work when she's leans forward to speak into a TV microphone. The slight and brilliant crinkle of crow's feet and dusting of gray around Eric Bana's temple. The warm embrace between Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman when they spot each other -- and they seem to need the warmth. Bullock keeps putting her hands in the pockets of her vintage '50s gown.

We've been doing this forever, not just since the middle afternoon, not just for eight decades of Oscar. Clytemnestra, in ancient Greek tragedy, put down a red carpet (or purple robes, in some translations) for her husband Agamemnon when he returned from war. She did it because she hated him, and she wanted to trick him into showing arrogance, which would displease the gods. He knew this, but he walked the red carpet anyhow. (Exclaiming as he did: Oh ma gaw!, Jessica Simpson-style.)

Meanwhile, Oh ma gaw! The Internal Revenue Service announced late last week that it will be taking a closer look at the swag trade -- the tens of thousands of dollars worth of freebies that celebrities snap up during Oscar week -- and urged the stars to remind their accountants to report swag as income. (We demand a fuller investigation; we expect Hill testimony from Knightley, who should be wearing librarian specs and three open buttons on a white blouse while they grill her about free jewels, spa trips, iPods. Just our advice.)

We understand now why Isaac Mizrahi got grabby with Scarlett Johansson several weeks ago at the Golden Globes. (Aside from the fact that he's a gay man -- a gay dress designer -- and it's sort of his unspoken right to zshoosh .) It's about wanting to make sure that any of it is really happening. It long ago stopped being about what matters. So he reached out. And we're thinking about doing that as Nicole Kidman draws near. And then, lucky for all of us, she is pulled away into the glamour stream.