By LESLIE GORNSTEIN
February 21, 2007
WINNING an Oscar is easy. Getting a room at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills? That's hard. This year, at least 60 nominees will stay in Hollywood's most desired hotel, where studio moguls lounge in the bar, Best Actor winners chat in the lobby, and everyone waits anxiously for that five-minute limo ride to the Kodak Theatre.
Yet even with an ample 285 rooms (98 of which are suites), demand has gotten so high that not even Academy Award favorites are automatically guaranteed the rooms they want. The biggest Hollywood heavyweights must use their connections with big studios, submit requests months in advance, or sometimes downright beg just for a room - any room - over that coveted weekend.
"The studios start calling us in the fall, about four or five months before Oscar weekend," says Carol Watkins, the hotel's director of entertainment sales. "And they give us their wish list, and I say, 'We'll see.'
"It's all about the nominees. In the end, things usually work out for everyone, but it's a yearlong process."
The hotel saves its first picks for the studios that Watkins calls "family" - movie companies that use the Four Seasons for press junkets year-round - and their talent. But even five-star names aren't immune from the room race. Just days ago, a male acting nominee lost his slot in the prized, $5,300-a-night Presidential Suite because his studio couldn't confirm in time.
All guests must agree well in advance to a three-night minimum, gold-statue status notwithstanding.
"You sort of have to have an ongoing dialogue over the months," says Marion Koltai, whose Picturehouse studio is putting up the talent from "Pan's Labyrinth" this weekend. "But we still have a couple of producers on the waiting list."
Watkins says that no matter how far in advance a studio requests an Oscar-weekend suite, she makes no assignments until the Academy announces its nominations. A week after that, most of the hotel is officially booked, but even days before the big event, everyone has an eye out for those all-important cancellations.
"If actors have to work, they may not be allowed to come to the Oscars that year," Watkins explains. "Or there's an illness, that kind of thing."
