And we’re in, with no time to spare. The lights go down and Neil Patrick Harris sings a special Oscars song. It does not seem to have a tune. Several people on Twitter who aren’t sure which Neil is which congratulate me on it.

And now our hosts: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. They come out, they make jokes. From the first mezzanine, the timing is off, the jokes are awkward, the delivery is wooden. But it doesn’t feel as if they’re playing to us. I wonder if it works on television, and send the question out on Twitter. A few hundred people tell me it’s just as bad on TV, twenty tell me they’re enjoying it. I decide this is what Twitter is for: keeping you company when you’re all alone on the mezzanine.

Best Animated Movie is the second category of the night. My fifteen seconds of Coraline talking to the camera go by fast. There, I think. The largest audience that my words will ever have.

Up wins.

The Oscars continue. In the audience, we cannot see what they are seeing on television at home. Somewhere below me George Clooney is grimacing at the camera, but I do not know.

Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. present the Best Screenplay award, and are funny. I wonder if they wrote their own bit.

During the commercials the lights go down and they play music to mingle by. Roxanne does not have to put on the red light.

I head for the first mezzanine bar. I’m hungry and want to kill some time. I drink whisky. I order a chocolate brownie which turns out to be about as big as my head and the sweetest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I share it.

People are wandering up and down the stairs.

Whisky and sugar careening through my system, I defy the orders on my ticket not to photograph anything, and I Twitter a picture of the bar menu. My fiancée is sending me messages on Twitter urging me to photograph the inside of the women’s toilet, something she did during the Golden Globes, but even in my sugar-addled state this seems a potentially disastrous idea. Still, I think, I should head downstairs and, in the next commercial break, say hello to Henry Selick. I walk over to the stairs. A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-List.

I am outraged.

I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored and have friends downstairs.

I decide that I will persuade the inhabitants of the mezzanines to rise up as one and to storm the stairs, like in Titanic. They might shoot a few of us, I decide, but they cannot stop us all. We can be free; we can drink in the downstairs bar; we can mingle with Harvey Weinstein.