There are famous faces everywhere - and that's just on the flight over from Dublin, writes Michael Dwyerin Los Angeles, ahead of tomorrow night's Academy Awards
Tuesday. The movie menu on Aer Lingus flight EI 145 from Dublin to Los Angeles features a timely selection of awards season contenders, from Atonementand Michael Clayton, which have seven nominations each at this year's Oscars, to Garage, which collected four prizes at last Sunday's Ifta awards in Dublin.
The passenger list on EI 145 is awash with film-industry people, but most are too busy talking about movies to watch any. Oscar-winning South African actress Charlize Theron has the unique distinction of being on the aircraft and in one of the in-flight movies, In the Valley of Elah, for which her co-star Tommy Lee Jones has a best actor Oscar nomination this year.
Theron is passing on this year's ceremony. "I'll be watching in my pyjamas," she says, adding that she'll be rooting for Tommy Lee from her bed.
She and her partner, Irish actor Stuart Townsend, are returning to their LA home after the enthusiastically received Dublin International Film Festival screening of Battle in Seattle, the politically charged movie that features Theron and marks Townsend's assured behind-the-camera debut as screenwriter, producer and director.
Colm Meaney is travelling en famille to LA, having attended Sunday's Ifta awards, where he was nominated as best actor in the bilingual drama Kings. He mentions that he and fellow Dubliner Jason O'Mara play the leading roles in the US version of the engaging BBC time-travel series, Life on Mars.
Neil Jordan is on the plane, getting back to the business of Hollywood studio meetings after the writers' strike that stopped most US film and TV production for more than three months.
The day after Jordan won his screenplay Oscar for The Crying Gameat the 1993 ceremony, Michael D Higgins, the minister for arts at the time, re-established the Irish Film Board. Jordan's fellow travellers aboard EI 145 include two dozen Irish producers travelling to LA on a trade mission organised by the film board and funded by Culture Ireland.
Ireland's best prospects of Oscars this year are Wicklow resident and Irish citizen Daniel Day-Lewis, who looks unbeatable as best actor for his towering performance in There Will Be Blood, and Falling Slowly, the plaintive ballad written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, and performed by them in Once.
John Carney, who wrote and directed Once, is also aboard EI 145, as is the film's producer, Martina Niland. Carney, a former member of Hansard's band The Frames, denies rumours that he will play bass guitar to accompany Hansard and Irglová at tomorrow's Oscars show. The messy matter regarding the song's eligibility for an Oscar was resolved at the 11th hour, on the day before the ballots were mailed to the electorate, and that brief controversy is not regarded as an obstacle to its Oscar chances.
WEDNESDAY. IT IS a small world. Ascending an escalator in the Beverly Center shopping mall, I hear my name called, and there's Oscar nominee Glen Hansard going down the other side. He's out shopping with his mother, who's buying a dress to wear at the Oscars.
He is eagerly looking forward to the ceremony. "It's breathtaking," he says. "I feel very proud to be Irish on a week like this. January is my lucky month. We made Once in January 2006. It won the audience award at Sundance in January 2007, and we got our Oscar nomination in January 2008." He has brought 10 of his family and friends to LA for the occasion. He managed to get tickets for five of them to attend the ceremony, and the other five will watch the show at a party hosted by the US distributors of Once, Fox Searchlight. His Once co-star and off-screen partner, Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová, has brought her parents and her grandfather, who doesn't speak a word of English, Hansard says.
"Mar is the most famous person in the Czech Republic now," he says. "She's been all over the papers since we got the Oscar nomination, and they just mention me at the end as her boyfriend." They had their Oscar ceremony rehearsal the day before, and Hansard says it was thrilling to perform their song with a 120-piece orchestra conducted by veteran composer Bill Conti.
The night before, Hansard brought his mother to a Hollywood party where they met Ringo Starr. Ringo was amused to hear that she sneaked through a rear window to see the Beatles in concert at the Adelphi in Dublin in 1964 - and found herself in the dressing room of the Fab Four, who had her evicted.
Actor and green activist Leonardo DiCaprio has asked Hansard and Irglová to perform at an eco-themed party this evening.
First, they are attending the very lively reception hosted by the Irish Film Board and Culture Ireland for the trade mission to LA. The venue is poolside at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard - given the throng, it's amazing that nobody falls into the pool - and the Onceduo bring the house down with acoustic performances of Falling Slowlyand Van Morrison's Into the Mystic.
The guests include Irish director Kirsten Sheridan, whose film August Rushfeatures the song Raise It Up, which is nominated with Falling Slowlyand three tunes from Disney's Enchantedfor best original song at the Oscars. She is so convinced that Oncewill win that she placed a bet on it before leaving Dublin for LA.
Peter Devlin, nominated for an Oscar in the best sound category for his work on Transformers, attends the party, having been working all day on the Star Trekprequel JJ Abrams is directing. Devlin is from Belfast, where he started out at the BBC audio unit in 1981. This is his second Oscar nomination, after Pearl Harbor(2001).
"So I know what it's like to be sitting in the theatre waiting for the result," he says. "I'm sure I'll have sweaty palms on the night, but I'm really looking forward to it. Transformerswas a very challenging film to work on because it had so much pyrotechnics." It was very different, he says, to work on Ron Howard's film Frost/Nixon, which finished shooting late last year and features Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon. "There were no pyrotechnics on that," Devlin says, "but a lot of dialogue, and you always have to be alert as a sound mixer."
THURSDAY. AFTER TWO rainy days, it's dry, and warm enough for an al fresco lunch on Sunset Boulevard. The food is fine, and less than half what it would cost in Dublin, but the service is overbearing. The waitress wears a perma-smile, reacts with phoney excitement as each course is ordered, and as I leave, she actually says: "Thank you. You were wonderful company." LA has to be the world capital of insincerity.
In downtown LA, Oscar-nominee Seamus McGarvey is shooting the new movie from Atonement director Joe Wright. The film, The Soloist, stars Jamie Foxx as a schizophrenic, homeless musician, with Robert Downey jnr and Catherine Keener. McGarvey, who's from Armagh, is nominated for best cinematography for his remarkable work on Atonement, which features a virtuoso five-minute tracking shot of the wartime evacuation of Dunkirk.
He has been "over the moon" since getting his Oscar nomination. "I couldn't believe it when I heard the news," he says. "I'm so looking forward to Sunday night. I'm glad the ceremony is actually happening. We're invited to Elton John's party afterwards and to several other parties. The only drawback is that I have to be back on the set at six o'clock Monday morning."
Another Atonementnominee, Saoirse Ronan, who is 13 and from Carlow, is shortlisted as best supporting actress. She won't arrive in LA until the eve of the Oscars because she's busy working in New Zealand on the new movie from The Lord of the Ringsdirector Peter Jackson, The Lovely Bones. She co-stars with Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz in the film, based on Alice Sebold's best-selling novel.
As darkness falls on Los Angeles, many of the guests from the previous night's Irish party are on the town again and attending the US-Ireland Alliance's annual Oscar Wilde film awards. Duke Special provides the entertainment afterwards, and Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, tirelessly exuberant, take the stage for three songs, one a vigorous version of Brendan Behan's The Auld Triangle.
TODAY. THE TEAM for Once, Hansard and Irglová, director John Carney and producer Martina Niland, will be among the guests at the annual US Independent Spirit awards, where the film is nominated for best foreign film against such heavyweights as the Romanian abortion drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, and the politically charged animated feature, Persepolis.
The Spirits ceremony, an afternoon event that is so casual and laid-back that it usually runs even longer than the Oscars ceremony, will be held in a vast marquee on Santa Monica beach.
A US publicist has invited me backstage to the swag area where guests such as Javier Bardem, Cate Blanchett, Ellen Page, Dennis Quaid, Josh Hartnett and Zach Braff will be invited to choose free gifts from a collection that includes handbags, phones, scents, sunglasses, espresso machines and "organic apparel". I have passed on the offer to interview the celebs about the freebies they get.
This year's host for the Spirit awards is Rainn Wilson, from the cast of the US version of The Office. He is such a fan of one of the Spirit acting nominees, Angelina Jolie, that he has already planned what to say when he meets her: "Adopt me."
TOMORROW. STREETS WILL be closed off and lined with fans all day as the cavalcade of Oscar nominees, presenters and guests converge in oversized transport on the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
It's unlikely that any one movie will sweep the board, although Joel and Ethan Coen's film of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Menis widely expected to take at least four Oscars from its eight nominations. If it doesn't dominate, the most likely beneficiary will be There Will Be Blood, or maybe Michael Clayton.
A recurring subject of conversation all week in Los Angeles is that all these Oscar front-runners have such dark and heavy themes, and some are suggesting that they could be pipped by the upbeat low-budget smash hit Juno, dealing with a pregnant 16-year-old schoolgirl seeking the ideal adoptive parents for her unborn child.
In a new angle on Oscars promotion, the distributors of Junoassembled elaborate recreations of the girl's bedroom, known as Junoverse, and put them prominently on display at shopping malls in Los Angeles, where most of the voters live.
There's a lot of talk about how many "foreigners" are in contention for Oscars this year. Only half of the 20 acting nominees are Americans; of the other 10, seven are European, two are Australian (both named Cate Blanchett) and the other ( Junostar Ellen Page) is proudly Canadian.
It looks certain that three of the four acting awards will go to Europeans: Daniel Day-Lewis (best actor), Javier Bardem (best supporting actor), and Julie Christie or Marion Cotillard (best actress). If, as I suspect, Tilda Swinton takes best supporting actress, that will make it four out of four for European actors.
The most controversial category is best foreign-language film, given that all the perceived front-runners failed to be nominated, among them Persepolis, The Orphanage, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.
Ironically, No Country for Old Men, which failed to win any award at Cannes last year, is the hot favourite for the best picture Oscar.
One of the big media stories here all week has been the threat of rain overshadowing the fashion show on the red carpet as guests parade their way into the Kodak theatre. Fear not. Tarpaulin has been organised to protect these stellar personages from such unpleasant realities of everyday life, even in Hollywood.