A block before we reach the Kodak Theatre the car is searched, and then we’re there and I’m tipped out onto the Red Carpet. Someone pushes a ticket into my hand, to get the car back later that night.

It’s controlled chaos.

I am standing blankly, realizing I have no idea what to do now, but the women look like butterflies, and there are people in the bleachers who shout as each limo draws up. Someone says, “Neil?”

It’s Deette, from Focus. “I just came back from walking Henry through. What a nice coincidence. Would you like me to take you through?”

I would like that very much. She asks if I would like to walk past the cameras, and I say that I would, because my fiancée is in Australia and my daughters are watching on TV, and Kambriel will be happy to see her jacket on television.

We head down into the throng, behind someone in a beautiful dress. It looks like a watercolor of a dream. I have no idea who anyone is, except for Steve Carell, because he looks just like Steve Carell on television, except a tiny bit less orange.

We are scrunched together tightly as we go through metal detectors, and the beautiful watercolor dress is trodden on, and the lady wearing it is very gracious about this.

I ask Deette who’s inside the dress, and she tells me it’s Rachel McAdams. I want to say hello—Rachel’s said nice things about me in interviews—but she’s working right now. I’m not. No one wants to take my photo, or, Deette discovers, to interview me. I’m invisible.

At the bend in the red carpet we pause. I look down at Rachel McAdams’s watercolor dress and wonder if I can see a footprint. Cameras flash, but not at me.

And we’re into the Kodak Theatre. Someone else introduces me to the editor of Variety. I realize my facial recognition skills do not work when people are in tuxedos. (Except for James Cameron, whom I have now only ever seen in a tuxedo and would not recognize wearing anything else.) I tell this to the editor of Variety. He points to a man with a tan and a huge grin, tells me it’s the mayor of Los Angeles. “He comes to all these things,” he says. “Why isn’t he behind his desk, working?”

“Er. Because this is the biggest day in Hollywood’s year?” I venture. “And it’s Sunday?”

“Well. Yes. But he still comes out for the opening of a drinks cabinet.”

I went to the Golden Globes six weeks earlier and discovered that the commercial breaks in award shows are spent in a strange form of en masse Hollywood speed-dating as people shuttle around the room trying to find friends or make deals, and assume that tonight will be much the same.

The Kodak Theater has a ground floor and, above that, three mezzanines. My ticket is for the first mezzanine. I head, sheeplike, up the stairs. There is a crush to get in, as a disembodied voice tells us urgently that the Academy Awards will start in five minutes. I stare at the woman in front of me. She has blond hair and a face that’s strangely fishlike, a scary-sweet plastic surgery face. She has old hands and a small, wrinkled husband who looks much older than her. I wonder if they started out the same age.