2002

Best Picture: a beautiful mind

The Oscar Gift Basket had been in place as a way of ending the evening for a few years by this time, but by now it had become evident even to me that it was going to take something else to hold our guests' flagging interest in the show as it staggered into the gruelling homestretch of documentaries and technical awards. So, we started adding games and prize giveaways throughout the evening; this particular year we had a guess-the-Oscar-winner-from-the-still contest, and a prize drawing based on "Moulin Rouge" characters. Particularly in the early days of this tradition we gave away anything and everything...CD's, DVD's, books, and lots and lots of toys (the new category of Best Animated Feature made it particularly easy to choose thematically-appropriate gifts in this category). Even those (very) few who weren't lucky enough to have their name drawn from the lottery bin by the night's end at the very least got some chocolate gold coins to take home for their trouble.

To add to this extravagance we'd picked up a new and improved color printer by this time, and I started printing out select pages of the invite (like the ballot cover) on glossy photo paper, just 'cause I liked the way that it looked. At this point in time there was an entire three-month gap between Christmas and the Oscars, so it didn't feel like one financial extravaganza coming right in on top of another, not to mention the fact that there were only the two of us in our family to provide for...but very soon....