In the real world, "The Searchers," "Baby Doll" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" made 1956 a memorable year in film. So did "The Bad Seed" and "The Girl Can't Help It," for even more perverse reasons. And an Alfred Hitchcock film, his second version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much," even won an Oscar, if only for Doris Day's rendition of "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)." But by and large, the voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to see 1956 as a sunnier sort of year.

The Academy liked thinking big, way back then. And it preferred its big films to have a wholesome aura, or at least an emphasis on laudable lessons. So "The Ten Commandments" was a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination, as was "The King and I." Quaker chic triumphed with "Friendly Persuasion," and "Giant" was admired for its good looks and epic potboiling. Best of all, by the Academy's lights, was "Around the World in Eighty Days," the star-studded travelogue with its debonair charms. The touristy world that it traveled was not a world most of us knew.

With hindsight, it would be nice to suppose that the Academy's choice was made in a vacuum. Come on: we all know that "The Searchers" would survive the test of time a lot better than David Niven and Cantinflas in a balloon. Maybe the voters even knew it too. But their choices were, are and always have been about something larger than the films at hand.

In the Cold War context of that voting year, Academy members clearly chose to embrace safe, conventional entertainment. And every year, their voting is a Rorschach test along similar lines. Picking "Forrest Gump" over "Pulp Fiction" reveals more about the voters' state of mind than about their actual ballots. So does choosing "Ordinary People" over "Raging Bull." Or "Gandhi" over "E.T." and "Tootsie." And "Dances With Wolves," the Academy's best-directed Best Picture of 1990, is simply too painful to mention.

So coverage of each annual Oscar melee involves as much social and cultural criticism as hard news. Even when those details come disguised in stories about hairdos and parties, they have a way of being revealing. For 2002 is the year, for instance, when Oscar presenters received free mattresses and La-Z-Boy recliners—and the usually glamour-crazed Academy even felt like disseminating that data to the public. It's the year when dirty political campaigning and dirty Academy campaigning drew from the same playbook. It's the year when race and the mental illness of a movie's main character were more widely discussed than the lukewarm caliber of the nominees. And it's the year when a $5 million diamond-studded dress and $1 million diamond-studded sandals.were sent forth to be ogled by a nation at war.

The news stories, interviews, essays and post-mortems of to be found here all contribute to that picture of Oscar. And it's a bigger picture than any Best Picture, to be sure. We can tell ourselves that Oscar-watching is frivolous and incidental, that we pay attention only casually or bet on the outcome because no horse race is easily available. But, finally, it matters. Our sneaking interest in the Oscar process implicates all of us in its outcome--even if billions of disenfranchised Oscar fanciers never get closer to voting than they do by clicking their televisions' remote controls. Whatever they pick, they're delivering signs of our times.

And there are always the eternal questions: like how on earth did Grace Kelly ("The Country Girl") beat Judy Garland in "A Star is Born," Audrey Hepburn in "Sabrina," Dorothy Dandridge in "Carmen Jones" and Jane Wyman in "Magnificent Obsession" in 1954? To find the answers, read on.