1999

Best Picture: shakespeare in love

By this time we'd gotten quite elaborate with our decorations for the party. The "Oscar Wall of Fame" (a set of hand-drawn prints from the early sixties depicting all of the Best Actor and Best Actress winners up to that time) had already been on display since practically the very first year. I believe it was for the '99 party that I started to obtain and display posters for Best Picture winners from years past in our living room. I'd get our very tallest ladder out of the garage and make the perilous climb up it to hang the posters from hooks on the wooden beams that ran across the ceiling of the living room. I kept this tradition going until I hit my early forties, at which point I decided that "fell to his death in his living room" would look pretty embarrassing in my obituary.

The Oscars were moved to Sunday night starting this year, which gives our guests an opportunity to have a more leisurely dinner than before and mingle a bit before the show starts. The ceremony itself just went on forever this year (4+ hours!), and the Oscar Gift Basket went to the guest who came closest to guessing when it would end. John Hill picks the latest time and wins (scant compensation for staying up to 1:00 in the morning.) But the evening still wasn't over...

One of our guests decides, on this particular (rainy) evening, to park their car on our lawn rather than in our driveway. Not too surprisingly, by the evening's end their car's tires have sunk deep into the mud, which requires several of us to get behind it and attempt to push it free. This is not to be the first nor the last time that this is to happen at a party at our house; on this ocassion, though, the car is so deeply mired in the mud that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't get it out, and our guest is forced to leave their car at our house overnight and send a tow truck over the following day to have it pulled free. Oops!