Jackson cool in Oscar circus

By RUSSELL BAILLIE at the Oscars

It's the biggest day of his career and Peter Jackson feels like a performer in a circus.

With Hollywood in a ferment, the Oscar-nominated director, producer and screenwriter is playing it cool.

"It's a bit of a circus, let's face it, and we're all the performers in the circus," he said.

"So you just have to go along and enjoy the ride, I guess. I am trying to look on it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I may never be here again. And so I'll just soak it all in and take from it what I can."

The New Zealander is confident his The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film will today take home some of the 13 Academy Awards for which it has been nominated - a feat he says would be "the most amazing thing in the world".

In a typical Kiwi display of modesty, he describes his film as the underdog.

Jackson's restraint is in stark contrast to the hype gripping the movie industry's Tinseltown.

Since Thursday night no fewer than 19 glittering and exclusive industry parties have been held for Tinseltown's good and great. For weeks, everybody who is anybody on Hollywood's A-List has been angling for invitations to the top, "must-be-seen-at" parties.

Security is tighter than ever for the moment when stars including Jackson, Russell Crowe - installed by bookmakers as best actor favourite for his role in A Beautiful Mind - and Nicole Kidman parade up the red carpet on Hollywood Boulevard. To stick to deadlines, Academy Award organisers have given nominees 45 sec egg-timers to keep acceptance speeches short at the 74th annual ceremony.

About 500 specially picked film fans will sit in front of hordes of TV cameras to watch the stars enter the Kodak Theatre. Hundreds of guards and police on horseback will patrol the area and fences will keep pedestrians confined to a few feet on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

New Zealand's own pre-Oscar party - hosted by Trade New Zealand - was held on Saturday night at the plush Beverly Hills Hotel and attended by 300 guests, including Jackson and - briefly - Crowe.

Crowe would not talk to any media, and didn't stay for the dinner. Instead, he headed downtown to a basketball game.

However, his brief presence meant all this year's New Zealand Oscar nominees, including Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson, were briefly gathered under one roof.

At the party, Jackson said the consensus among the New Zealand nominees was that they were outsiders.

"It doesn't feel like we are favourites, put it that way. We're underdogs and maybe being underdogs is a good place to be."

Jackson's name is on three nominations - best director and best adapted screenplay, and as an LOTR producer he is up for best picture. But he doesn't fancy his chances in any of them.

"For some reason our screenplay has been very overlooked ... There is this perception that you take a fantasy book and just write the script and the book is so amazing so you just have to translate it into a script form and the job is done for you.

"And I stand very little chance as director."

Likewise, Philippa Boyens, who wrote the script with Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, is resigned to hearing someone else's name read out as the winner.

"It's not being defeatist. We are not losers, we are non-winners. It really isn't about being negative.

"The nominations that come with it are fantastic but on top of that you can't really have any expectation ... The one that all of us would like to see is best picture."

Richard Taylor, the head of Weta, the company that provided the Rings special effects, has three nominations - best visual effects, best costume (with Ngila Dickson) and best make-up. It is the first time a single person has featured in so many technical categories.

Taylor, who has brought his mother, Jean, as his date for the night, says he is pretty relaxed about what might happen today.

"She [Jean] has slipped out of the gumboots, put on the evening gown and come to LA - straight from Patumahoe to Tinseltown."

Taylor also has mixed emotions.

"People keep saying, 'Are you excited?' It's not at all that we're cocky about it, we just don't understand the hype of what this is about. It makes it very, very unusual being here. It's very special, though."

Nominated editor John Gilbert brought his teenage son Max along for the show and Hollywood's many after-match functions.

Jackson laughs that he can't wait for it all to be over, because as the awards season has stretched on it has taken him away from post-production on the second film in the LOTR trilogy, The Two Towers. So 13 may not be an unlucky number for The Lord of the Rings, just perhaps the beginning of Oscar history.

Meanwhile, in the final days before the awards the American media focus has been on the awards' racial politics in the acting categories, especially as African-American actor Denzel Washington has emerged as chief rival to New Zealand-born leading contender Russell Crowe in the best actor category. But Crowe's A Beautiful Mind remains the film to beat, in Hollywood, anyway.

nzherald.co.nz/oscars

Oscar nominees (full list)