Manchester Hits Hollywood

Ever wondered how the other half live?

THE GLITZ and glamour of Hollywood is usually confined to the pages of Hello or Heat, but for one weekend Student Direct managed to infiltrate those illustrious hills. Alice Wilkinson, a second year History student, got the once in a life time opportunity of spending four days rubbing shoulders with tinsel town’s finest at the Oscars. We got a chance to catch up with her and find out the truth about what goes on at perhaps the most prestigious awards ceremonies in the world.

Now Alice, of course, is no ordinary Joe who happened to stumble across gold dust in the form of a spare ticket. She is the daughter of one of Britain’s best actors, Tom Wilkinson, best known for his roles in The Full Monty and Batman Begins. This was his second Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, this time for his performance as Arthur Edens in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. Usually Alice’s mum, actress Diana Hardcastle, would have donned a designer gown and flown out with him, but she was unable to attend and so to her disappointment (and Alice’s absolute glee) there was a spare tickect kicking around to the prestigious event in L.A.

Tom, I should point out, is very different from your run of the mill international star. He avoids going to celebrity events and leads a very low profile life in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill. Although he has acted alongside the likes of Michael Caine and Emma Thompson, as soon as the cameras switch off, so does he. Alice has not been brought up amongst the glitterati and still gets excited when she sees Mackenzie Crook (Gareth from The Office) who also lives in Muswell Hill. This also meant that she was “dreading” the Oscars, worried about how she should behave around film stars of such calibre. But after the experience, she felt so acclimatised to the celebrity surroundings that she barely even battered an eye lid when she found herself self sitting in first class just seats away from Laura Linney.

The Oscars, explains Alice, is not simply one night of awards, it is a four day “utterly exhausting” parade. “We were put up in the famous Four Seasons and we had a $150 a day tab to spend on anything we wanted, I chose the minibar!” (You can take the girl out of university life, but you can’t take university life out of the girl). Her instant induction to the Hollywood lifestyle included a chauffeur driven limousine to dozens of events, including the Independent Spirit Awards, the Warner Brothers party and the Elton John after show.

“At every event we were given fantastic goody bags, with all sorts of treats inside, ranging from DVDs to cosmetic products”. Alice describes how the avalanche of freebies “was perhaps the most surreal part of the whole experience”. Everywhere they went there were people giving away the most over-the-top goodies. “Suddenly in our hotel gliding out of nowhere came this six-foot tall blonde bimbo who beckoned to us”. She took Alice and her father to a huge room in the hotel which had been divided into dozens of booths where they were giving away everything from tooth paste to designer gold jewellery worth thousands of pounds. “I amassed a suitcase worth of treasures, including a Nintendo Wi, two pairs of designer sunglasses from Elore and a pile of designer dresses”. They were so lavished with gifts that Tom was even tempted to return a Mulberry bag he was given purely because he could not be bothered to take it home!

“I can now understand why celebrities become deluded over their own importance. After a while you can’t help feeling a false sense of superiority, but on the other hand I also felt disgusted that the very people who were on the receiving end of these free goods were the least deserving in that they are perfectly capable of paying for them themselves”.

But now to the main event - the stars themselves. Alice could not swing her new mulberry bag without hitting an A-lister. In the Oscar auditorium she pretended to be unfazed by the fact that she was sitting seats away from Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh Jackman, Helen Mirren and Renee Zellweger. Unfortunately earlier that weekend she had already suffered a Bridget Jones moment herself. “At the Warner Brothers party I was starving and made a bee-line for a beautiful sushi buffet. I delved in and picked up a piece of fish dripping with soya and had just stuffed it in my mouth when Dad tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Alice, meet George’. I turned around, with fish grease sprawled across my fingers and dripping from my lips, to be confronted by George Clooney and Casey Afflek. All I could do was spit the food back onto my plate and smile nervously”. But what was her memory of George? Was he as amazing as everyone dreams he is? “All I can remember is thinking he’s got a really round head”.

Back on the red carpet, top film stars are paraded back and forth in front of the world’s press for two and half hours. “I was on the red carpet as my dad’s guest for the event. I’m obviously a nobody but by the end of the two hours the press were shouting out my name as well as the likes of Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett. Oddly enough I was so self-conscious by all the flashguns going off that I hardly noticed all the celebrities around me. Although I do remember Angelina Jolie because despite being pregnant, she was so thin and still managed to look incredible, perfectly formed like Jessica Rabbit”. Everyone does get a little star struck and even Tom was full of “school boy glee” when they met Lisa Kudrow, being a huge Friends fan himself.

By now Alice was becoming a dab hand at playing the part of a superstar. “After two hours on the red carpet it’s another four hours in the auditorium which is exhausting. No one can stand sitting there for this entire period but there are regular breaks for advertisements. For those three minutes you were allowed to leave and could not come back until the next advertisements. Dozens of stars would take a well needed break in this time. To not leave empty seats for the viewers, the Oscar organisers pay people called seat fillers. When Robert Elswit went to collect his award for cinematography he turned to acknowledge Daniel Day Lewis only to find himself greeting a Chinese man employed as a seat filler!”

After arriving home from four days of socialising with the beautiful and the best, I presumed that returning to the grey reality of university life would be somewhat disappointing. But Alice sighed a breath of relief that she could return to normality and keep the Oscars as an incredible one off experience that she will always remember. Despite the fact that Tom did not win the award, which went to Javier Bardmen for No Country for Old Men, Alice still found the whole experience “absolutely awesome”. Although relishing her time in the lime light, she was more than grateful to be back in the dingy lights of Robbos!