The Big Show is exactly the kind of book you’d expect from a leading movie-magazine journalist who’d been given an all-access backstage pass to the Academy Awards ceremony for eleven years. It’s an “inside look” at an event most of us only see the outside of, but a carefully managed one.

The backstage personnel come across as so uniformly competent, dedicated, and funny that they begin to feel like characters from Singin’ in the Rain or Argo. Anecdotes about the stars never cut too close to the bone or stray too far from their public images: Russell Crowe is grumpy, Judi Dench is classy, Tom Hanks is unfailingly nice, Robin Williams is unpredictable. The most emotionally revealing moments are invariably flattering: Kevin Spacey being courtly to a stunned Julia Roberts in the wings, or Michael Douglas earnestly thanking the show’s producers for the “respect and honor” they showed his aging father, Kirk. The high points of every show are lauded, and the misfires—like host David Letterman’s dead-on-arrival “Uma . . . Oprah” joke—handled briefly and gently. Pond is a sharp-eyed observer and a graceful writer, but he has no interest in biting—or even aggressively nibbling—the hand that feeds him.

The Big Show excels, however, in its depiction of the technical side of the story. Aware that he is, in effect, telling the same story fifteen times, Pond uses his first several chapters to introduce the reader to the rhythms of planning, rehearsals, dress rehearsals, and the show itself. The later chapters cover these structural elements more lightly, allowing room for sidebar discussions of topics like seat-fillers, stand-ins, acceptance speeches, gift baskets, and a dozen other subjects . . . all fascinating for the movie fans who are the book’s target audience. I found myself repeatedly, delightedly saying: “So that’s how they do it . . .” ( )