Editor's Note

I sit in front of my computer screen the day after the Academy Awards and find myself taking the People Magazine Oscars Dress Quiz. Sadly, I know all the answers. My brain records this trivia thoroughly, though it will be discarded in a matter of months-- Julia Roberts in Valentino, Jennifer Lopez in Chanel, Renée Zelwiger in canary yellow vintage Dessès.

Before I moved to L.A., I never watched the awards, the parade down the red carpet and catty pre-show talk, the incongruity of ball gowns in broad daylight. But now I watch the damn spectacle every year, though every year I promise myself I will refrain. I watch the pseudo royalty of a country supposedly without royalty, watch Hollywood congratulate itself in a mire of satisfaction and mediocrity. I wait for subversion, and was actually rewarded this year with Björk in her wonderfully ironic swan dress and gutsy performance which blew everything else away.

Now I look at the whole thing as a perverse rite of Spring, as if that red carpet, and those charmed bodies walking down it, bring the sun a bit closer, as if Hollywood is the court of the Sun King and we're the mud-christened peasants shouting for Bread! Fashion Tips! Human Sentiment!

So here's where I bury my hopes, where no one will ever find them-- I keep them in the L.A. that defies Hollywood, that survives despite its cultural hegemony. This is it-- the buried treasure: our secret L.A.

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