Well, it’s almost Oscar Night, and I am so not ready.

This year I’m not even sure which movies have been nominated for which awards, much less who should win–and I still have to get the ballots printed up, cook the chili, and vacuum the dog hair out of the family room so there’s enough room for people to sit down without having to push a golden retriever tumbleweed out of the way.

We have to be ready for the Oscar Party, after all.

This is a party that started up, without our permission, mind you, about twelve years ago, when we were beset with friends simply arriving on Oscar Night, waving ballots at us and insisting on sitting on our couches. No, no, turn the TV in this direction. I can’t see well enough. No! I want the arm chair–you sit on the floor.

We were flattered, make no mistake. When people claim that your family room is the Only Good Place for Watching the Oscars, what are you supposed to do? Say you’re too busy?

Deb was the main perpetrator: one year I discovered that she’d actually sent out invitations and had bought little prizes for the winners in each category (okay, so they were Christmas presents she’d been given that she didn’t like, but they were still prizes). My cousin Jennifer also showed up from Boston, armed with movie trade magazines and piles of reviews of movies she’d been studying. Diane, who was having a long-distance relationship with a sitcom writer in L.A., would show up filled with insider information–and the three of them, along with my kids and husband and me, would puzzle over our Oscar ballots as if the fate of the free world depended on the outcome.

Over the years there have been different casts of characters who attended. We auditioned participants, depending on if they could meet our stringent requirements, which were:

  • You have to watch the Joan Rivers portion of the show and have passionate opinions about hairstyles and gowns.
  • It helps if you have cultivated a few tidbits of insider information you can dispense throughout the evening. (This is like that portion of Hardball, when Chris Matthews turns to his guests for the segment called “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” and it is highly competitive.)
  • You must not actually want to watch the actual Oscars as much as be in the mood to scream and yell and jump up and down, throwing balled up Kleenexes at the television set and falling to your knees when something weird happens, like the night that guy climbed over the seats to go up and accept his award. (We have lost a lot of people over the years who thought they were being invited to actually watch the Oscars with us, and then were horrified when we wouldn’t shut up.) (We can’t. We have no control over ourselves.)
  • The person scoring the ballots has complete jurisdiction, and just like in Florida and Ohio, ambiguously marked ballots will be disqualified (although whining can sometimes have a good effect).
  • There is no requirement for actually seeing any of the movies. We learned that lesson when 6-year-old Stephanie voted the straight Babe ticket back in 1995, and ended up winning far more categories than any of the rest of us, despite the fact that we’d seen all the movies, read endless Vanity Fair pieces, subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, and actually studied the probabilities for months ahead of time.

This year, Diane and Jennifer are both living in California, Stephanie has gone to college, and two others aren’t sure they’re going to make it. It might be just Deb and me watching and screaming and throwing Kleenexes at the television.

If I’d hoped that meant it was going to be less competitive, I was sadly mistaken. Today she called from her cell phone, demanding to know who I was voting for in the Best Sound category. I told her I had no idea.

Really? she said. There is one movie that she felt was head and shoulders ahead in sound, and surely that was going to win, only she can’t remember the title. Then she went on about Martin Scorcese and Queen Elizabeth and on and on…

I finally had to break it to her. “I saw one movie, and I’m going for ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ all the way.”

There was a long silence and then she said: “Are you crazy? That doesn’t have a chance in the world.”

Yeah, but that’s what she said about “Babe,” too.