Okay, not really. But, it’s the closest I’m ever going to come to holding one of those golden gentlemen in my hand. It just so happened last year that my dad & step-mom were visiting from South Carolina over Oscar Sunday, so I decided to throw a party. It was lots of fun with them, my step-sister & her fiancĂ©, their baby (who was 3 months old at the time), and a few friends. As my friends left for the evening, they said “That was fun… can’t wait for next year’s party!”
Next year?
Pressure was on! I decided at the dawn of 2014 that I liked having the party, loved decorating and the Oscar bingo & ballot game, but my place was a bit cramped for the number of people. I was also pretty disappointed that my friend Jennie and her husband Tim – two of the bigger movie buffs I know – had gone to an Oscar party thrown by Tim’s friend that they’d committed to before I decided to have one. So I asked her months ago if she wanted to “co-produce” this year’s party and hopefully combine our friends and his movie buff friends into one party. I’ll decorate (my specialty) and she’ll cook (her specialty). Jennie agreed and we started pinning ideas to my Oscar, Oscar board almost immediately.
The Decorations
What would I do without Oriental Trading Company? They have a TON of decorations, favors, and other fun party accouterments for super cheap. I’d given out little movie clapboard photo frame key chains last year, so this year I opted for mini film reel decks of playing cards. Super cute. When I was in charge of food last year, I kept it simple. I used a large black divided party tray from Dollar Tree and served different movie theater candies: Red Vines, Reese’s Pieces, Junior Mints, etc. and included a movie theater box of everyone’s favorite in their goody bag (my dad got Raisinettes, for example). This year I went back to Dollar Tree and got little bags of the movie theater candy to include in the goody bags since Jennie would be cooking actual food. And, their $1 Mylar star balloons were great decorations and entertainment for Joy, Jennie & Tim’s 3 year old. Also a great source of entertainment for Joy was the red carpet that I put out leading up to their front door, which she insisted upon going outside several times to walk on the “red rug” (technically, she’s not wrong, it’s a rug). We even had a posing session for her!
The Food
As mentioned, my friend Jennie is really the cook among our group of friends. For the past two years, we’ve actually gone to her house for Thanksgiving and have not been disappointed. We sat down to plan out the menu with the idea of pairing different meals to the different Best Picture nominated movies. Well, having not SEEN any of the nominated movies ourselves, the only things we could come up with weren’t clever at all and in one case might be offensive (you can imagine…). We found a great article with suggestions, but they were SO specific that you really had to have seen the movie to understand why the food would be paired with it, and we didn’t feel like being that obscure. So we opted instead to go for movie themed foods and keep it general. In all, Jennie made pulled BBQ Pork sliders, strawberry and pound cake kebobs drizzled in chocolate, cupcakes with movie themed picks in them, chocolate covered strawberries, and more.
The Activities
Aside from our rapier wits and snarky sense of humor our group of friends shares, we had to have something else to keep us busy! Huge thanks to Jessica Jones at How About Orange for coming through with clean, elegant printable Oscar Ballots and Oscar Bingo sheets for the second year (at least)! The ballot was a great tradition and I’m very pleased to say that I blew everyone else out of the park (though there was some dissension in the ranks as to whether or not I should win being a co-host… whatever!) and the bingo definitely kept us glued to the TV. I had fun prizes like additional candy and toys for winners.
The Manicure
Of course you know I had to have a special manicure for my co-produced Oscar party! Last year I went with a gold nail and a single black matte accent nail. It looked good, but I knew this year I could do better. I was tempted to use the appropriately titled Julep Oscar, but since I’d picked up the Sally Hansen Satin Glam Go Gold polish earlier in February, I wanted to use it again. I also wanted to stick with a black & gold theme to match my decor. So I flipped it, a bit. I decided to go with a black matte base for all my nails, using Sinful Colors Black on Black with the Essie Matte About You top coat for the matte finish. Then I used my dotting tools and made 3 dots along the tips of each nail with Go Gold. I got a little dot happy with the thumbnails and put mini dots in between the bigger dots and it filled out the tip better.
The Results
Unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts, long drives, and some people throwing their own Oscar party after being invited to ours, we ended up a small crew with just Jennie, Tim, & Joy, me, and our friends Lorenza and Rachel. So I have a TON of goodies left over since we were planning for more people. It was still a lot of fun. Jennie was able to tailor the food for the amount of people who actually showed, so she had some left overs to deal with but nothing uncontrollable. Being a tight knit group who, with the exception of Tim, have known each other for 20 years this year, our friends were sufficiently entertained with the decor and goodies, and not disappointed when one of the food items turned into a Pinstrosity 🙂
Before you yell at me, yes, I know the Oscars was 2 months ago. Inspiration to write can’t be rushed… or, something like that!
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