Someone tells me on Twitter that nobody’s checking the elevators. I suspect that this might be a trap, and head back to my seat.

I have missed the tribute to horror movies.

Rachel McAdams presents an award in her beautiful, oh-so-tread-on-able dress.

For the Best Actor and Actress awards, a tableau of people who have worked with the nominees tell us how wonderful they are. I wonder if this works on television. On the stage in front of us it is painfully clumsy.

People below us are milling and chatting and schmoozing more with every commercial break. There is an edge of panic to the disembodied announcer’s voice as she orders them back to their seats.

The man in the bar who reminded me of Sean Penn turns out to have been Sean Penn. Jeff Bridges’s standing ovation reaches all the way to the top mezzanine. Sandra Bullock’s standing ovation only reaches the front rows of our level and stops there. Kathryn Bigelow’s standing ovation covers the entire hall except, for some reason, the top right of the first mezzanine, where I am sitting, where we remain sitting and clap politely.

It all seems to be building up to a crescendo, and then Tom Hanks walks out onto the stage and tells us, with no buildup (if you exclude months of For Your Consideration campaigning) that oh, by the way, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and good night. And we’re out.

Up two escalators to the Governors Ball. I sit and chat to Michael Sheen, who brought his eleven-year-old daughter Lily, about the sushi dinner we had two days before, interrupted and ended by a police raid. We still have no idea why. (Next morning it will be a front-page story on the New York Times. They were serving illicit whalemeat.)

I see Henry Selick. He seems relieved that Awards Season is over, and that he can get on with his life.

I feel as if I’ve sleepwalked invisibly through one of the most melancholy days of my life. There are glamorous parties that evening, but I don’t go to any of them, preferring to sit in a hotel lobby with good friends. We talk about the Oscars.

The next morning the back page of the LA Times Oscar supplement is a huge panoramic photograph of the people on the red carpet. Somewhat to my surprise, I see myself standing front and center, staring down at Rachel McAdams’s beautiful watercolor dress, inspecting it for footprints.

This was originally published in the March 25, 2010, issue of the Guardian under the title of “A Nobody’s Guide to the Oscars.” I’ve restored the original title here. It wasn’t about being a nobody, it was about being out on the days when you would best be at home, and melancholy.

A Wilderness of Mirrors

Who am I?

It’s a fine and legitimate question, one that haunted me when I was a boy. I would stare into the bathroom mirror and do my best to answer it, teasing information from my reflection, hoping for a clue. My face would be framed by the mirror: a glass shelf with toothbrushes on it beneath my face, tiled wall and frosted glass window behind me. I had too-short dark hair, one ear that stuck out from the side of my head and one ear that didn’t, hazel eyes, red lips, a sprinkling of freckles across my nose.