Peter Sinclair - And the Oscar goes to...

By PETER SINCLAIR

This month, for the first time, Brad Pitt will be given the chance to utter the most fateful words known to man: "And the winner is..."

Having uttered them a few times myself, he has my sympathy. Whatever he says, 99 per cent of his audience will be furious.

Presenting at this year's Oscar telecast is probably a sort of consolation prize - it will be the closest Pitt has come to the sexless gold statuette since 1995, when he was nominated for his supporting role in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.

The 72nd Annual Academy Awards presentation will be broadcast live from the hideous Moroccan-motif Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium on Monday, March 27. And no, you won't be able to watch it on your computer; ABC Television, who have the broadcast rights, aren't crazy about the Web.

(Results will be available on the Herald Online, however, beginning at 2 pm, Monday 27 March.)

But you can psych yourself up for the glitziest event on the Tinseltown calendar by visiting the homepage of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and from there segue to the Website of the Oscars themselves, where you'll find a huge archive of video clips from this year's crop - a brief, tantalising taste of every nomination.

Those convinced the whole thing is a put-up job may find the mysterious disappearance last month of 4000 ballots in the mail less than reassuring. The ballots, about four-fifths of the total sent out, were delivered to a post office in Beverly Hills and promptly vanished. It's not the first time this has happened - there was a similar scandal in 1982.

But putting paranoia aside, the beautiful people are breaking out their glad-rags and they don't come any gladder than at the Oscars. There's a run-down of red-carpet fashion at Oscar.com, both yesterday's (glimpses of Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren) and tomorrow's, clothes which bear about the same relationship to real life as some of the movies themselves.

There's also an examination of guy style, but really, the tuxedo can only stand so much analysis.

They're not called the glitterati for nothing, either. Check out those rocks! In the early years of the awards, stars wore their personal jewellery to the ceremony as a status-symbol to wow the fans - Norma Shearer, receiving the Oscar for Best Actress in 1930, could barely lift her arms to accept it for sheer weight of diamonds.

These days, romantic costume jewellery is considered both more fashionable and a lot cheaper. Nominated for Sense and Sensibility, Kate Winslet tried for a period look with a stunning Edwardian necklace; two years later Gloria Stuart wore Titanic-inspired blue faux diamonds to add sparkle to her nomination.

American Beauty or The Sixth Sense? Sean Penn or Kevin Spacey? Meryl Streep or Annette Bening? These are the burning questions of the year 2000.

But the nostalgic may find just as much satisfaction at Mr Showbiz where all the talk is of yesterday, from the first award in 1927 (Wings, one of the last of the silents, starring Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper) to the present.

Maybe I'm showing my age, but the names which come out of this year's envelopes will have to be darn good to top Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in 1939's Gone with the Wind.

E-mail: petersinclair@email.com