Night Before The Oscar© Nominations Announce, A Reporter From USA Today Slept Over There

As the staff at the Academy Of Motion Pictures did, and do every year apparently. And the announcers, as well.

This year, previous-Oscar-Acting-Nominee, Anne Hathaway, was announcing the Oscar Nominees, alongside Academy President Tom Sherak.

Since the Nominations are announced at 5:30 AM PST, to accommodate all time zones; they all sleepover at the site.

(Think they sleep at all?)

So Breznahan (as  he’s commonly known), who is an entertainment reporter at USA Today, chronicled the whole night before.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Don’t talk about that!” says academy president Tom Sherak, whose lively personality in the middle of the night is the human equivalent of a double espresso shot. “You’ll jinx us!”

The first to know the nominees are the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Rick Rosas and Brad Oltmanns, who go to an undisclosed location (seriously!) and tally the ballots.

At 8:58 p.m. Monday, the two dark-suited accountants roll a cart with three boxes of printouts into the fourth-floor gallery at academy headquarters, where an exhibit dedicated to Noel Coward is on display. The cigarette-smoking playwright gazes curiously from photographs behind the dozen people gathered for the big reveal.

The accountants have the solemnity of undertakers, but the workers rip open the lids and pull out pages like overeager kids on Christmas morning.

“You’ll hear some cheering. You’ll hear some cursing,” says Bruce Davis, the academy’s executive director. “These are movie fans, and they definitely have a few favorites. We can’t restrict them from that.”

As pages rustle, you can tell the surprises by the names called out. “Oh, my God, Jeremy Renner! The Hurt Locker!” exclaims Virtic Emil Brown, a communications coordinator, studying the lead-actor list. “He used to be in the same acting class with me, about five years ago. He was so nice!”

“The Blind Side?” There was some grumbling and eyeball-rolling, though the inclusion of the Sandra Bullock football drama was regarded as a success for the academy’s expansion of the best-picture field to 10 nominees from five.

It’s a feel-good yarn, popular with audiences, and exactly the kind of movie some viewers have complained the academy has overlooked in favor of darker, more art-house fare. Show producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are glad to see it there.

As the clock ticks toward deadline, the tempo increases among the secret-keepers.

Legions of reporters and photographers from around the world hustle for position in the academy’s downstairs theater. In the floors above, documents are still being printed, and Sherak and Hathaway are rehearsing the categories, adding phonetics to the prompter for the more tongue-twisting names.

Shankman, an avid tweeter, has his phone out, checking messages. Everyone looks at it as if it’s the trigger to a bomb. “I didn’t Twitter, I promise! I didn’t tweet anything!” he declares as Sherak jokingly grabs at the device.

Hathaway has on her game face. “I’m doing the foreign-picture announcements, which is very nice for Tom to hand over,” she jokes. “He took animated (with titles such as Up and Coraline) and gave me foreign films (which include El Secreto de Sus Ojos).”

She has been singing show tunes as the makeup and hair people put on some finishing touches.

It’s almost 5:38 a.m. Showtime is imminent.

Hathaway, Sherak and producers Shankman and Mechanic move with a large group to the elevators. “The hardest part is that I want to call a friend of mine, and I can’t,” Hathaway says. “I just want to say, ‘This is what’s happening!’ “

The elevator doors close. Hathaway descends to the theater.

Soon she steps out on stage and tells the world instead.

Here’s a video from that:

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