Pre-dawn patrol

At 5:38 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning each January, the Road to Oscars begins with a five-minute reading of nominees' names under glaring klieg lights at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The Road to Nominations Announcements, however, starts the midnight before, with a minutely choreographed kabuki dance in which the academy theater opens to the press and production staff who prepare for the great moment, and to me, who comes to watch their work.

All quiet on the Wilshire front
No Times Square this. At 12:15 a.m., Wilshire Boulevard is deadly still. I park in a creepily deserted and unlit structure a few blocks away and walk through the silence down the great thoroughfare. A nattily dressed young man in blazer and tie trudges along beside me, an intern, I learn, for a network morning show. "I have no idea why they sent me so early," he tells me.

We enter through the back alley; two security guards check our names. I experience a bit of vertigo stepping out of the night into the blazingly lit academy theater.

A couple dozen TV techies shuffle dreamily as they set up camera stands between the rows of red seats, taping long cords down the aisles. A press assistant reminds the crews to label their equipment so it won't be confiscated when they are away.

Up onstage, the white backdrop and crystal podium await their moment in the sun, flanked by two 15-foot tall Oscars. After years of watching the show, for the first time I notice Oscar is holding a sword. How, I wonder, scraping away sleep, did I never see that before?

Found in translation
As the crews drip in, I look at the cameras that have claimed the prime real estate, two open rows in the center of either wing. Of the seven cameras set up at this early hour, I notice four are from Japanese television (the others are Italian, Dutch and U.S. cable outfits.) I wonder whether the Japanese effectiveness at securing the best spots is due to heightened diligence, or perhaps the nation's exceptional interest in the awards.

I bring my queries to a four-person crew from Tokyo Broadcasting who keep watch over their cameras, two of them sleeping soundly in the theater seats while two others, Mariko and Ken, stare patiently into space. "The world media," Ken explains, "shows up early because, unlike the Americans, they are not assigned spaces."

I ask them if the Oscars are of special interest to the Japanese audiences. "Academy Awards are always of interest," Mariko says. "American films do more business in Japan than Japanese ones." She tells me the folks back home are rooting for "Memoirs of a Geisha" and my heart bleeds for her.

Veterans on the local beat, Mariko has attended these announcements four times, she tells me. Ken, eight or nine. As he slumps deeper in his seat, I ask if this is a tough assignment. He shrugs, "It's a job. It's not difficult, it's just the hours." Then he adds, referring to the promised mid-shift food break, "And the breakfast is very decent."

The man with his finger on the button
At the center of every almost major event broadcast out of the Los Angeles area — from the Academy Awards to the Rose Bowl to the Grammys — there is one man in whose hands rest the fate of every second, every shot we see on television. That man is Andy Hazlewood, the SBC systems technician in charge of the giant cable box (a DV6000) through which all the images broadcast to the outside world must run.

And as the nomination hour draws nigh and the preparations in the theater reach a slightly more fevered, if still drowsy, pitch, Hazlewood, clad in jeans and a blue SBC polo shirt, almost nonchalantly reviews his machine, a giant router that looks like an old-fashioned plug-in switchboard encircled by dozens of cables that send the camera feed to the assembled TV and radio networks and out to the world.

"I've done this for five years," he tells me. "Takes us five days to set up for a show that lasts four minutes and fifty-one seconds." I ask with so much riding on him, what is his biggest fear. He replies immediately, "Equipment failure. One of those fail," he points to the DV6000, "and it would be a pretty serious situation."