A MALAYSIAN LIVE AT THE DOLBY THEATRE IN HOLLYWOOD…ON THE 89TH ACADEMY AWARDS…

By Mansor Puteh

I have been inside the Dolby Theatre once on a tour of it I made in November of last year and sat on a chair beside the one Leonardo de Caprio had sat last year when he won and Oscar for Best Actor, with a cutout mug shot of him staring at me.

To my surprise it did not look large; I thought it looked the same size as our Istana Budaya in Kuala Lumpur. And the seats where the Hollywood lay their behind on looked quite cheap.

Even the stage is as of the same size as the one at Istana Budaya, or maybe smaller. But the backstage of the Dolby Theatre is much smaller than the one at Istana Budaya.

And if you want to know the host of the show and the presenters did not speak off the cuff; they read from the text that is shown on the huge panel in front of them, which is out of the reach of the cameras.

I have never been invited to attend the Academy Awards before; I have to produce and direct something excellent to get that invitation.

But again, I had never been invited to the Malaysian Film Festival or other festivals organized by Malaysian television stations, too, except for a few times, when the organizers had someone who knew who I am. That’s how advanced and smart the organizers of this local Malaysian film festivals are.

But this did not bother me. I have been invited to attend some international film festivals in the past especially when my first film, ‘Seman: A Lost Hero’ was selected and when it won a nomination for Best Film in a festival in Portugal long ago, and presented papers in international film forums and even invited to be a member of the international observers’ team monitoring the Syrian Presidential Election of 3 June, 2014.

A huge crowd of people had started to converge on the Dolby Theatre long before the 89^th Academy Awards show was to start. And it looks like