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Every Oscar season, the curious wonder how the statuette got its name.  “He looks like my Uncle Oscar,” was the reaction from Margaret Herrick who in 193l was the librarian for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and our Hollywood cognoscenti believe this is the most dependable of the random stories.

For his 16th consecutive year, Wolfgang Puck is creating the menu for the 82nd annual Governors Ball dinner for 1,500 guests after the Oscarcast in Hollywood and Highland’s Grand Ballroom that’s being designed with a “Streamline Moderne” theme for the evening.  Wolfgang and his chefs Lee Hefter and Matt Bencivenga have corralled a culinary crew of 250 to prepare slews of hors d’oeuvres, with the first course being house-smoked salmon, potato galette, crème fraiche accompanied by warm brioche, followed by chicken pot pie with Yukon Gold potatoes.  Spago’s pastry chef Sherry Yard promises a dessert of baked Alaska with espresso glace and chocolate sorbet –  plus her by-now-infamous gold-dusted chocolate Oscar statuette as a take-home memento for the family.  Besides the cooks, count on an additional staff of 900.

Moet & Chandon champagne will be poured (1,200 bottles), and an 18-piece all-female orchestra will entertain, with the party produced by Cheryl Cecchetto.   Anticipated in the crowd are Oscarcast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman (designated the “odd couple” by USA Today), also Oscarcast hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.   In her  Deadline Hollywood Daily on the Web, Nikki Finke, who always gets it right, previews a spoiler or two.

Soul brothers they are by now, Johnny Depp and director-writer-producer Tim Burton, their latest togetherness being Disney’s $200-million-plus remake of the phantasmagorical Alice in Wonderland.  Which is really Underland. Alice struts off from her wedding ceremony and tumbles into the Victorian garden’s rabbit hole to discover a Down Under world of … animal crackers (crazies).  

Johnny and Tim have collaborated on seven films over twenty years.   Some were Edward Scissorhands, with a Frankenstein-ish Johnny birthed with scissors for hands … Ed Wood about a hopelessly dumbo movie director … the cuckoo candy maker in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Also: composer Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical, Sweeney Todd, about the demon barber of London’s Fleet Street, who slashes clients’ throats while Mrs. Lovett bakes his victims into pies.   Johnny starred as Sweeney Todd, and Helena Bonham Carter as the psycho pie maker.

Not your conventional fare, nor is Tim’s Alice in Wonderland, a live-action and animated film with sumptuous special effects.   Johnny cavorts as the Mad Hatter, whose name derives from the days when the  poisonous blue mercury component in the hat glue drove the hatters gaga.  Johnny and his loyal makeup artist Patty York and hairstylist Terry Baleil dreamed up the Mad Hatter’s orange hair, and his mismatched, oversized green eyes.  Johnny affects a fey Britishy accent, while his costumes change color with help from the Mad Hatter’s mood.

Tim’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, terrorizes as the heartless Red Queen, who oversees the Underland that’s under her despotic rule.   “She’s the Bad Witch,” Tim Burton claims, noting that we expect our fantasies to include both good and bad characters.  He suggested that Helena use Manhattan’s late real estate empress, Leona Helmsley, long labeled the Queen of Mean, as her inspiration, along with Bette Davis’ performance in Warner Bros. 1939 movie about Queen Elizabeth.  Helena’s gowned in freakish Elizabethan garb as she shrinks and grows in Underland.  

“Every movie has challenges, and Alice is about two worlds – the world Alice falls into with its zany creatures, and the so-called real world above.  They’re different, yet similar,” informs award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood.

Anne Hathaway primps as the White Queen, envisioned by Colleen Atwood as a sort-of-trashy Stepford Wives character, and Alice is played by the 20-years-young Australian beauty Mia Wasikowska (Va-she-kov-ska).  Alice’s body was painted snow-white for every frame – “up, down and all around,” adds Colleen.   (Mia next will be seen in Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy, The Kids Are All Right, a Sundance favorite filmed in Culver City and co-starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.)   Avril Lavigne wrote and performs the Alice song, and Danny Elfman, with 50 film scores to his credit, composing the soaring score.

Tim Burton makes no bones about his fear and hatred of cats, and praises Stephen Fry for his sinister impression of the cowardly Cheshire Cat, while Crispin Glover, as the Knave of Hearts in charge of the Red Queen’s Army, delivers chills with his patched eye.  Michael Sheen, who was born in the same Welsh village as Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, voices the in-a-hurry White Rabbit, and Christopher Lee hisses as the ferocious beast Jabberwocky.   Prancing about are the March Hare, Dormouse, Dodo Bird, Blue Caterpillar, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, etc.

“I never read the book,” admits Tim Burton about the 19th century Victorian classic published 150 years ago by Lewis Carroll, a pen name for Rev. Charles Ludwige Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christchurch University in Oxford.  Adapted by Linda Woolverton, Alice in Wonderland is produced by Richard Zanuck, Joe Roth and siblings Suzanne and Jennifer Todd, with Linda offering, “Alice’s story begins when she’s 19, and about to enter a marriage she’s not sure of.”

“When Disney asked if I would make Alice in Wonderland as a 3-D movie, I couldn’t resist,”  says Tim. “Why?  We’re talking about characters that are weirdos.”   “Right up his alley,” insists an executive from another studio.   Decades have given audiences any number of Alice in Wonderland films, the first dating back to 1903, also TV adaptations (including the 1966 What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing In a Place Like This?).  Even Cary Grant appeared in this mumbo-jumbo fairytale during the 1930s, another film was produced by Disney in 1951, and during the ’60s a pornographic Alice emerged.  The film’s already inspired spring and summer fashions from Donatella Versace and Stella McCartney, and jewelry by Swarovski.  The wide-reaching commercial aspects of moviemaking never fail to amaze.

Johnny, meanwhile, read Alice in Wonderland, also Through the Looking Glass, and recalls that other actors coveted his Mad Hatter role, including the late Michael Jackson.   “I’m bonkers,” his Mad Hatter tells Alice, who beams, “Most of the best people are.”