Between the BAFTAs and The Oscars.

Well here we are half way between the BAFTAs and the Oscars – the British Academy Awards and the Academy Awards proper. I say the Academy Awards proper as opposed to the American BAFTAs which is what the Americans say about some of their things.

They described Casualty as the British ER when Casualty was on over here way before ER – it's just something they do, I suppose, thinking that anything on television started over there.

The number one TV show over there is Dancing With the Stars which is a BBC Production (they even produce it) taken from Strictly Come Dancing which is a hit over here.

Their title is better, of course, but 'Strictly' – as they call it here – is taken from a very old popular show on TV called Come Dancing which was a top dancing show for many years over here; it was a competition between professional ballroom dancers. Sometimes there would be solo dancers and sometimes formation. I have to say it was very impressive, even though I hardly watched it, and my parents and most people of their age, then, loved it.

In the 1980s TV series, Edge of Darkness, Joe Don Baker played a CIA agent and would praise to the skies Come Dancing saying what a great show to have on television – yes, by the way, the same Edge of Darkness which was a recent feature film and totally unwatchable.

So next week I will miss the Oscars which was something I really enjoyed; I enjoyed the day with the parties, the pizzas and the razzamatazz.

We lived close enough to the place where the Oscars are held each year to be affected by it and, of course, it took them a week to get the streets ready, so at the moment I can imagine the streets of Hollywood will be blocked off. Hollywood Boulevard itself will be for pedestrians only; it is interesting as you can go and look at the rehearsals they hold in the street.

Not with stars, of course, but with extras; they get out of limos and other extras are in the crowd and cheer them; it's a rehearsal for the cameras and they do as much as they can.

They have tarpaulins in case of rain which very rarely have to be used and they build a bridge across Hollywood Boulevard to use for interviews and camera shots.

All the windows opposite, in the Roosevelt Hotel and other places, are blocked off and there is nowhere you can go on the boulevard to look through windows.

The people you see cheering have tickets to sit in those places and the security is so tight that on the day you cannot walk along Hollywood Blvd without going through security cages and being felt all over by faceless security people.

Hollywood Blvd goes from east to west and so do all the other streets with Boulevard as their tag – Sunset, Melrose and Beverly.

At about eleven-o-clock on the day of the awards, the limos have to line up on Beverly Blvd with the VIPs who are attending the show.

Inside the limos the nominees are being comforted as they sit in the big line of traffic and when they reach Hollywood Blvd they arrive in a pre-ordained order.

I have noticed that the big stars arrive later and the smaller ones and the technical nominees arrive very early; when the limos drop them off they go around the corner to the Highland Centre Parking lot.

When it's all over I should imagine it's a mess of confusion trying to find your limo – one year Steven Spielberg was interviewed holding a load of coats as he waited for both the limo and his wife – just like we've all stood waiting for our women holding bags and coats.

Standing around inside the theatre are people called seat fillers; these are people dressed formally who sit in seats as soon as one of the stars gets up to either present an award, receive one of just goes to the loo.

When I moved there in 1995, I knew someone who had worked on the production side of the awards many times, and he told me about the seat fillers and I tried to get in on it, just for the crac, but I was told they didn't need anybody else.

After the awards there are plenty of parties, plenty of after the awards TV shows and interviews; some of the shows are at the parties (never inside) and the day after, the LA Times is full of the red carpet pictures and Academy Awards stories and the day after that it all stops till the end of the year; that's when all the films, who will be nominated for the following year's Academy Awards, will be released. The reason for this is that the films which come out in the first six months or so of the year are forgotten.

The Iron Lady, for example, was released in the last week of December and some films over the years have been released on December 31^st – the last qualifying day. Sometimes those films only play for one week, to get the qualification in, and are released later.

One film that would have been nominated for Oscars was Bloody Sunday which was a British film but some clever clogs put it on TV in Britain first which disqualified it.

There are Oscar shows in Australia, Britain, Japan, Norway and probably many more but there is only one Oscar show and that's in Hollywood.

This year Billy Crystal will be presenting which means that Jack Nicholson will probably go so he can sit in the front row so Billy can make jokes about him.

The show, the razzamatazz, the people, the paparazzi and everything else is great fun but it doesn't mean anything at all.

The best actor, the best film and everything else is something that cannot be defined. It's only an opinion – I mean how can you compare one acting performance to another. One of the greatest performances by an actor one year was by Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop – he wasn't even nominated!

By the way, the name of the theatre, where the Academy Awards are held, is the Kodak Theatre and the company, Kodak, have just gone into Bankruptcy. They had signed a 20 year sponsorship deal in 2000 and because of their bankruptcy they had hoped to take their name off the theatre; a bankruptcy judge ruled that they could but the owners don't want that to happen; so we shall see what it will be called next year.