BUT, my editions of "Inside Oscar" and "Inside Oscar II" have a 3-year gap. The first book ends with the 1991 ceremonies and the second starts with 1995. What's up with that? Nonetheless either book is loads of fun, although I'm guessing the late Mason Wiley reined in his friend Damien Bona's snarkiness a few times. If the Oscars are your hobby, you'll love "Inside Oscar II" as much as you did the first book, and eagerly await "Inside Oscar III."

Appropriate continuation of Inside Oscar & Inside Oscar 10th Anniversary Edition, but I would have wished for more coverage of award years, say at least thru 2003 or 2004. It may be that the other info takes time to compile. It is excellent reference and any amount of waiting is worth it. Looking forward to its successor.

Clearly pretentious (read the introduction and you'll discover that the author writes that the "academy members are primarily craftspeople who don't possess the critical faculties and scholarly approach of cinephiles ..." hummmm), this guy -who pretends to be a cinephile- has preferred to write here a total personal statement, mainly leftist (but sometimes you wonder...), and clearly mean, against the Oscar ceremony,and the people who vote for them and, those who receive the little golden boy(see in example how he prefers to quote only the bad reviews and not one good concerning Braveheart, which made, by the way, a confortable $210,409,945) rather than giving the reader an objective work, written with distance and elegance. Maybe he has never been able to enter the industry he seems to hate so much, and instead of getting an Oscar, prefers to spend time criticizing it with his typing machine, forgetting how much it's easier than... winning an Oscar or doing a movie.
(getting one star for the paper and the ink)

One of the great things about Inside Oscar 2 is how detailed it is about the movies that were not just nominated but were contenders. You really get a clear picture of the years 1995 to 2000. The writing is strong and there are some very funny passages in the book. One of the drawbacks is how opinionated the book is. In Inside Oscar there may be some brief sentences on how a some critic or critics disliked a movie. That was fine. Here you have Bona going on and on about how he disliked it and while sometimes that can be funny, I am not sure it follows the path set by Inside Oscar. Exceptions in Inside Oscar the years 1993 and 1994. The book is strong enough that it still is worth reading and owning even with that flaw.

Baseball has the World Series. Football, the Super Bowl. And movies have the Oscars. Even those of us who sneer at the assembly line product that fills theater screens for most of the year, smugly correct our less pretentious friends when they say "movies" instead of "film," and gag at some of the Academy's choices ("...and the Oscar goes to Roberto Benigni"), this annual behemoth of often startlingly bad taste is impossible to resist.

And a week after the prizes have been handed out, it's often difficult to remember who won what and why. That's where Damien Bona and the late Mason Wiley's "Inside Oscar" came in. In grand Hollywood tradition, Bona has written a sequel that continues the saga of the movie world's most enduring superstar, a bald-headed, gold-plated guy who, like Elvis, is so famous he doesn't need a last name.

Oscar is in the mold of a lot of Hollywood heroes. Like Clint Eastwood, he doesn't say much and rarely cracks a smile. Yet everyone wants to take this stern looking character home. But how do you attract his attention?

Like its predecessor, "Inside Oscar 2" details the cutthroat and merciless tactics that have been employed to win the golden guy's approval. The shameless campaigning, the backstabbing, and the money, money, and more money that goes into getting what amounts to a mere pat on the back from one's peers is all deftly exposed in so much detail that it makes all other Oscar books obsolete.

This edition covers the eventful years of 1995-2000 when Oscar made some choices he may never live down (Begnini as best actor over Nick Nolte and Ian McKellan; "Shakespeare in Love" as best picture over "Saving Private Ryan"), and seemed to be influenced more than ever by tasteless campaigning (the Harvey Weinstein-Miramax influence on the awards are in full blossom by this time).

Bona writes with a cynical and decidely liberal bent, devoting a lot of space to the controvery surrounding a lifetime achievement award for super fink Elia Kazan (whom he obviously despises). So, he's a little biased (okay, VERY biased), but for Oscar junkies, this book and its predecessor offer the best, most thorough coverage available, following each notable nominee and potential contender for the big prize through the entire awards season: from the National Board of Review's ranking of the year's best, to the various critic's awards and the Golden Globes, right through to Oscar night and its aftermath. There's also the complete list of winners and nominees for each category, as well as each year's presenters.

"Inside Oscar" and "Inside Oscar 2" are the definitive biography of Hollywood's biggest star - Oscar.