Wake Me Up

I make some guacamole, buy a radioactive flagon of mojitos, and we sit down to watch the 83rd Academy Awards. 

- What's wrong with James Franco's face?

asks my husband, thirty minutes in.

I don't know. 

I thought Franco was behaving oddly during the pre-show interviews, but assumed -- he's a clever sort -- that it was some sort of hilarious bit that I was just too slow to understand.

Perhaps I am slow, because Franco's performance throughout the whole show is similarly enigmatic. His expression defies description. A statistical analysis:

80% nonplussed Keanu Reeves 
15% the peevish face my cat pulls when you put something too close to his nose
5% the half-smirk Rhett Butler makes during Scarlett O'Hara's violent tempers

It really is the Mona Lisa of awards show performances. Anne Hathaway isn't too bad, albeit very GO TEAM GO perky-shrieky-yay in a way that sees me topping up my drink frequently.

Google 'James Franco Oscars' now, and the second most popular option is 'James Franco Oscars High'. Or is it a case of Occam's Razor -- simple nerves, an over-tight truss? 

Monday is dull enough as it is. I give you five drug-free explanations for the James Franco Oscars Face:

- hacked teleprompter screen full of obscenities so vile they make a Mel Gibson rant look like a Charlie Sheen rant, and a Charlie Sheen rant look like a Julie Andrews song  

- sentient hologram of Bob Hope wandering backstage harvesting souls

- contractually-obliged colonic irrigation immediately prior to show (Franco told it was 'standard beauty treatment, kind of like a facial')

- at the dress rehearsal, Anne Hathaway baked a metaphorical cake of rainbows and smiles, sprinkled it with ground-up cheerleaders, Wolverine's nail-clippings and Zoloft, and stuffed the entire thing, whole, into her enormous maw. Nauseated and traumatised by this, Franco decides to go the other way, method-acting a mouthful of lye-flavoured sourpatch candy

- is that... is that Kim Basinger in the wings? She's not presenting, is she? Oh dear god, no -- this is still a dream within a dream within Alec Baldwin's dream, and it's about to get stabby. WAKE ME UP!

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Trying to Get Inside James Franco's Mind

You're Invited!™ (No, Not You)

You're Invited!™

say the 2011 Academy Award billboards; we're not, but we go anyway. At least, we go to the Kodak Theater, twenty-four hours before the event, for a little light gawping.

We could do with the exercise. On Friday, I didn't leave the house at all; first there was a hangover -- grade 'nuclear winter' -- and then there was a migraine. I lay on the sofa for several hours, unable to find the remote or otherwise escape 'Maid in Manhattan'. The cat clambered over me, dribbling. Eventually I went back to bed; Dr Strangename came home, at the end of his working day, to find me in exactly the same position as when he'd left that morning. He can be very sarcastic.

Today I'm up by ten-thirty and we manage to leave the house before two. There's just no stopping us. We get the 12 to Westwood and, in undeserved good bus karma, transfer quickly to the 302.

It's always a relief when the bus behaves itself, as, approximately once a fortnight, Dr Strangename puts his foot down, shakes his fist, and says we'll never go on the Metro again. But this Saturday it's swift and uncrowded, and Dr Strangename laughs at the potholes on Sunset that threaten to disengage your cranium from your spine and roll your head down the bus like a bowling-ball.

We pass though Beverly Hills, with its ice-cream stripes of strawberry, vanilla and mint -- bougainvillea, white-washed walls, lemon-trees and lush hedges, almost pretty enough to distract you from its purpose (keep your dirty little bus-rider eyes off my lawn).

In West Hollywood we pass everyone's favourite artificially-enhanced-sex superstore:

JOIN THE HUSTLER FAMILY!

says a poster in its window, next to the shamrock-themed erotic outfits. I imagine the Hustler family: mom showing plenty of underboob in a sawn-off t-shirt, bending cheerfully over the (unlit, but no one notices) BBQ; dad doing some suggestive business with a foot-long; daughter eighteen yet still obliged to wear an undersized Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

Prohibition Is Over

appears in white on a sober black billboard across the road. No, thank you; after Thursday night, prohibition is back, and this time it's personal.

(I was drinking these lovely, faux-Japanese martinis, made from elderflower and lychee and gin, and they were as light and meadow-fresh as a fabric softener commercial. Friday morning, they may as well have been Clorox.)

Just as bus sickness and residual hangover are about to cause disaster, we reach Hollywood. Apart from Downtown -- where a woman directed a canary-coloured rain of junkie vomit at me -- Hollywood is the least glamorous district of LA we've seen so far. It's a particularly unappealing combination of genuine grot, tourist tat and anodyne chainstores. But everyone who visits us wants to go there, and, god, here we are again, of our own volition. You feel guilty for patronising it, as if encouraging some morally-dubious commerce that lowers us all, like a nice young man who keeps finding himself in Thai brothels.

But this weekend Hollywood is brisk and professional, full of tents and trailers and people with clipboards. Hollywood Boulevard is closed to traffic for several blocks, and we skirt alongside a screened area that is the Oscars red carpet. We can't see it, but we know it's there.

After being diverted through some battleship-grey service corridors -- it's no more than we deserve -- we find ourselves in the Kodak Theater. An Italian correspondent in a backless evening dress and a lot of panstick is making a broadcast. I take a photo of a sign saying NO ACCESS, and am reprimanded. There's more red carpet, a cinematic sweep of stairs, and some shrouded Oscar statuettes. Although the carpet is covered in polythene, we aren't allowed to step on it. I take several more photos. Even Dr Strangename is awed.

Eventually, we get to the top of the Hollywood and Highland mall, where you can look down fifty feet onto the transparent tent and red carpet walkway below. I see the public audience bleachers; I applied for a seat, but it's something like a 0.035 chance and I didn't win. Can't catch a break. This aerial shot is the closest we'll get.

We briefly consider throwing ourselves off the mall terrace onto the plastic roof, where we'd bob, waving at celebrities, for a short while, before being shot down like a couple of rogue parade balloons. But the celebrities aren't here until tomorrow, and we can't be bothered to take the bus again.    

They told me to come to Hollywood,
that it was the third biggest industry in the world.
Number one was safety razors.
Number two was sticking plasters.
Hollywood was number three. So I came.
-- Cowboy Actor

This is written on the mall's floor, along with lots of other dubious stories relating to The Road To Hollywood. Outside, we're filmed by someone getting establishing shots for The Lead-Up To The Oscars -- do look for us on Belgium TV -- and I linger outside a production van for Channel WowWowWow Japan, hoping to be discovered as a new Gaijin Tarento.

In the end, we walk south back to Sunset and wait for the Metro home. Our companions here are a guy with a guitar and gas mask, and another man who looks exactly like the reprobate who shot Sam in 'Ghost'. But on the way back through West Hollywood, I see a sign saying

Pierced People Pray Too

and resolve to be less superficial.

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Hermetically Sealed Hollywood

Facts for Visitors

GOD IS STILL SPEAKING

says a sign on Westwood Boulevard. It sounds testy, or ominous, or plaintive, depending on your mood.

Today on the Westside it's Golden State sunny but cold in the shade, and by the BluWave Carwash a man is wearing a sack over his ragged clothes for warmth. He's cut holes for his head and arms, and secured it round the midriff with twine, making it look like a Medieval tunic.

This is at Santa Monica and Westwood. Last month, in the LA Times, I read that there was a particularly nasty accident two blocks down from here; a northbound car crossed early, an eastbound car crossed late, and their collision killed a pedestrian waiting at the lights. Both drivers survived. The Escalades shall inherit the earth.
   
When the Blue Bus gets to Westwood proper, I switch to the Metro. While I'm waiting -- leaning against the wall of a Burger King that accepts food stamps -- I watch students, doctors and nurses at the busy six-way crosswalk. The UCLA medical buildings on the other side are monoliths; plaster-cast white, darkly mirrored or sonar-screen blue. My friend Rodeo Girl, TX, told me the other day that she overheard a hospital administrator on her campus shuttlebus say she loves the sound of ambulances sirens: it sounds like business. Rodeo Girl wants to get the hell out of TX .

After a while, a tourist asks me the way to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and whether this is the right bus stop because the schedule says there should have been a bus by now but there hasn't  been so he's just wondering if there will be. I reassure him that it'll arrive eventually. Which it does.

When I get on, the guy in front of me has trouble swiping his bus pass.

- It don't work,

says the driver.

- It should work.

- But it don't,

he restates, and then lets him on anyway. I feed my dollar fifty to the fare machine. The only other people onboard today are two middle-aged ladies chatting in Spanish. One pleasant thing about taking the bus is, I suppose, the knowledge that, should we recreate the film 'Speed' right here and now, I will be a shoe-in for the Sandra Bullock character. That's just demographic fact. The 302 rattles up onto Sunset Boulevard, and its ads feature the same poem that always haunts me on this route, ending.

Some men will make a grave out of anything.
Anything.
Times when a body could dig through the night.*

Then I get off the bus near the Hustler store, and am nearly run over by a hippy on a Segway.



*Srikanth Reddy, 'Sonnet', from Facts for Visitors (LA/Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2004)

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American Cinematheque

On California

5 Things You Will Learn About California, or Maybe Just LA

- that there are tarantulas in the wild here. Have I seen them? Sure. Seen 'em on the internet. That's the only reason I'm not on the slow boat back to England right now.

- that if you take the 8 to Westwood and the 302 to Hollywood and push your way to the front of a crowd of people at a star-unveiling ceremony, you may 'accidentally' run into Colin Firth. He will be wearing more make-up than you. What are the odds?

- that eventually, and much to everyone's relief, you will be able to say 'Santa Monica Boulevard' without taking 10 seconds to sing '...Until the su-un co-omes up over San-na-Mon-ica Boulevard'. Ditto for omitting 'Straight Outta' when referring to 'Compton', saying 'LAPD' without the urge to shout 'FREEZE' afterwards, and not appending 'Inglewood' with 'In da hood, up to no good': all verbal tics likely to get a white British girl punched off the bus.

- that you should never put your zipcode into the LA Times Homicide Report. 

(Back in Europe, you are strangely comfortable with a farmhouse where multiple generations of your family have breathed their first and last, a college room adjacent to the site of historic burnings-at-the-stake, and a German residence which was possibly bombed by your own grandfather...

...Here, you will become hysterical upon learning that someone was stabbed to death in your apartment building several years ago. In the early hours, you will imagine his ghost wandering the communal corridors, as translucent blue as the night-lit swimming pool.)

- that people will compliment you on your charming accent and then be unable to understand anything you say; also, that bringing back your Somerset accent will improve comprehensibility 90%:

"Oh waitress, may I have a glahs of wahtuh?"
"What?"
"I mean, oilav a glasss'o'waderr, moy love."
"Sure."

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