2001

Best Picture: gladiator

We had our kitchen renovated just prior to the party this year, and at Gwen's behest I made a special request in our invitation: that no one bring any food with them that required cooking, reheating, or any other kind of special preparation in our brand new kitchen. I think people just kind of accepted the explanation that Gwen wanted to christen the new kitchen with her first Oscar Party meal unencumbered by any interference at face value. However, since lo so many years have passed since then, now the truth can be told: at the previous year's party, one of our guests brought along an enormous pot of something that he cooked up on our stove and managed to melt our oven timer in the process. I didn't know that it was even possible to melt an oven timer just by putting it in the proximity of a lit burner on a stove, so this was a real learning experience for me. Gwen talked about this incident for years afterwards whenever the party was approaching, so, please, if you should ever be considerate enough to bring a dish along with you and cook it up on our stove, please keep an eye out for any oven timers nearby...

It was a memorable first meal that she cooked up, too: in honor of Best Picture nominee "Chocolat" Gwen prepared a Spanish dish of chicken with chocolate sauce that tasted a whole lot better than you would have expected just from the description. (There were other types of sauces available for the chicken, too, for the chickens who were too afraid to try it with chocolate sauce.)

I also (finally) figured out a way to program everyone's votes into an Excel spreadsheet which kept a running tally of everyone's scores for me throughout the evening. Of course, this involved trading one problem for another: now I spent most of my time from when the guests arrived until the show started entering everyone's votes into the Excel database. It would take me a couple more years to figure out a way of disentangling myself from this particular chore.