This week there is one pivotal thing on the mind of many actresses - the Oscars red carpet. As everyone knows, on Oscars night that red carpet is transformed into a runway, a runway seen by millions. Actresses, particularly nominees, become models for some of the best and most promising designers in the biz. In fact, Oscars night could make or break an entire career.

Behind every A-list nominee, there is a team of fashion and beauty personnel clamoring for her love and approval. To win over an actress and have one's design appear on the red carpet is akin to winning one of those shining golden statues.

According to The New York Post, the act of dressing an Oscar-nominated actress is an entire extravaganza unto itself.

Actress Bestowed with Gifts of Liposuction, Facelifts

Stylist Philip Bloch dished to The Post about the darker side of the red carpet. "Some stylists will take gifts from fashion houses," he said. "I've heard of them offering vouchers for liposuction and other nip/tucks. Some designers will just Oscars Awards 2012 Live Stream 'What do you want?' I've never got involved in that but I always say 'I wouldn't take a bribe, but I love a great thank-you present.'"
Some of the most shocking revelations included offers of "free facelifts" and $5,000 "tokens of appreciation."

Click Here Watch Now ====>> Oscars Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Online Free Tv PC

Though this might seem completely ludicrous, the publicity a designer can get from an Oscars appearance is unparalleled. And Boch would now. He chose Halle Berry's iconic 2002 Oscars dress - an Elie Saab gown with sheer, embroidered top and burgundy skirt.
Oscar Awards Live stream
"That dress put my career into the stratosphere," said Bloch. "It launched the designer's career, and it changed Halle's life forever. In that dress, she looked beautiful but vulnerable ... it caused people to see her in a whole new light."

That one single dress has made the rankings of "Best Oscars Gowns of All Time" since Berry wore it in 2002. Elie Saab is now not only a household name, but also a red carpet-favorite.

But, Boch confessed, "The industry has become polluted."

Money Talks

Merle Ginsberg, senior writer at The Hollywood Reporter, revealed another tactic in the battle for red carpet reign - cold, hard cash.

"Actresses are very often paid to wear a certain gown," Ginsberg told The Post. "Having Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow walking in your dress is worth an enormous amount of money in terms of advertising and brand, and the designers figured that out some time ago."

"If a designer approaches a celebrity asking to dress them, this agent might say, 'We're looking for a deal that's worth $200,000' - and that figure is on the lower end. You can only imagine the sums that change hands to ensure an actress wears a dress for just one night."

Historic, renowned fashion houses like Chanel "don't pay anyone, because they don't have to," according to Ginsberg, but smaller, newer ones might have to go to extremes.

"Some designers do it the subtle way - the actress gets to keep the dress, she may be flown to fashion shows in Europe and sent free clothes all year round," said Ginsberg.

Actress Charlize Theron is the face of Dior and a paid "spokesperson." The stunner wore a pink Dior frock to the 2012 Golden Globes and will likely choose the designer for the 2012 Oscars as well. Endorsement companies have become an integral part of the overall red carpet process.

This year, labels will be watching top actresses like Michelle Williams, Rooney Mara and Jessica Chastain for potential endorsement deals, Ginsberg told The Post. 

Oscars Gown-Picking Process

Stylists will typically choose between 40 and 80 gowns for his or her celebrity client to choose from for Oscars night. Many of these choices come from the latest fashion shows, i.e. Paris Haute Couture or New York Fashion Week.

However, designers can and will turn down even the most popular Oscar-nominated actresses.

"Designers do turn celebrities down, absolutely," admitted Ginsberg. "There are two 'not skinny' actresses who are nominated for Academy Awards: Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer - check out the labels they've been wearing to awards shows: Badgley Mischka and Tadashi Shoji. They might look good, but they're not getting Chanel ... and women over 40 probably aren't getting Chanel."

"It's not just the stylist's relationship with the fashion house that dictates what labels someone is offered, it's much more than that," said Ginsberg. "Even if you look at the difference between Cameron Diaz and Anne Hathaway in terms of what they wear ... you're more likely to see Anne in couture. She's more likely to be in a serious, Oscar-style movie ... Cameron might be in a hit movie, but she has a different image to designers."

If an actress wants a custom-made gown, she must contact a particular designer months in advance of the Oscars.

"If you want a custom gown sketched by a designer with beading and embroidery, that can take many weeks to prepare," Marilyn Heston, head of MHA, an Los Angeles-based international company that pairs celebrities with designers and luxury brands, told The Hollywood Reporter.

However, custom-made gowns are not given out like candy. In fact, they are reserved for the most special leading ladies. 

"It's not an overnight deal to get a spectacular Oscar dress. Generally, these tailor-made dresses are only offered to nominees and presenters for the Globes and the Oscars. If a designer spends all that time and money on a gown, they want to make sure that it will end up in Vogue or Women's Wear Daily. This is not an artistic endeavor. The only reason a global designer is dressing an actress is to gain exposure that will raise awareness and increase sales."

Every year, it seems, the Oscars offer at least one pick - and sometimes several - that confound the American filmgoing public. And every year, the fact that those who vote are kept secret confound those seeking a smidgen of accountability.

But don't expect the Oscars to change.

IN PICTURES: Academy Award nominees 2012

"People need to remember as they watch the Oscars that the winners may or may not reflect mainstream tastes, but rather reflect the likes of a very specific constituency - that of their colleagues," says Robert Thompson, founder of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York.
Watch Academy Awards Online
If you want to know what America likes, check out box-office figures, he and others say.

"This is only the Academy deciding what it wants to reward for excellence and we, the viewers are being allowed to watch in," says Thompson.

Sometimes, Academy voters feel it's important to spotlight films that did not do well at the box office, but which they feel are excellent. "Hurt Locker," which won Best Picture in 2010, is an example. Its box office was only $17 million, compared with $750 million for Avatar, which was also nominated.

"The annual Oscars are a vital component of our cultural machinery, not only reflecting taste but producing it - and thereby creating profit for moviemakers," says Ben Agger, director of the Center for Theory in the University of Texas at Arlington's sociology department, in an e-mail. "The voters are insiders rewarding insiders."

Click Here Watch Now ====>> Oscars Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Online Free Tv PC

But who are the insiders?

A Los Angeles Times report found that 94 percent of Academy members are white and 77 percent are male, with blacks making up only 2 percent and Latinos less than that. The median age of Oscar voters is 62, with just 14 percent under 50 years old.

This has led to accusations of gender and race bias. But Charles Bernstein, who for 10 years was chairman of the Academy Award rules committee, is a bit tired of the yearly accusations that come AMPAS's way.

"The Academy is not a democracy but a meritocracy," he says.

The job of the Academy is not to reflect but to lead, he adds. These are great professionals who have achieved distinction in motion picture-making, and they are merely saying, "Here is what we most respect.'"

He cites two reasons for why the Academy does not print member lists. One, it prevents them from being polled by newspapers and polling organizations. Two, it prevents direct lobbying of academy members.

"The integrity of the Oscars is protected by not publishing comprehensive lists," he says.

Indeed, the Oscars have never been about reflecting America or even Hollywood at any given moment in time, says Peter Lehman, director of the Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture at Arizona State University, in an e-mail. 

That's why many great directors have gone unrecognized throughout their entire career and many great films are overlooked, he adds.

"The Oscars give Hollywood a chance to put forward what they perceive as the most favorable image of themselves in any given year," Watch Academy Awards Online says. "The Oscars are more about how the industry would like the public to perceive their films and what is best about them."

IN PICTURES: Academy Award nominees 2012

Each year, the Oscars recognize A-list talent we regularly see on screen, on the red carpet, and in tabloids. But the Academy Awards also reward those who work behind

 the scenes: the writers, editors, costume designers, and others who help create trophy-worthy movie magic. This Oscars season, we'll be toasting those off-screen artists by delving into the hidden secrets that helped create the on-screen magic that we -- and the Academy -- fell in love with. For more access backstage during this Oscars season, click here for EW.com's Oscars Behind the Scenes coverage.
Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream
If you want to pinpoint the specific moment when Rise of the Planet of the Apes stopped being a punchline, you can look right back to the very first teaser for the the sci-fi preboot, which ends with a striking close-up shot of primate protagonist Caesar. He's not doing anything. He's just... thinking. The combined efforts of performance-capture performer extraordinaire Andy Serkis and the visual effects team at Weta Digital Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Caesar into summer 2011's most unexpected hero -- and earned the film an Oscar nomination for Visual Effects. That striking shot was actually the first successful image completed by the effects team, and the story behind that shot provides an intriguing snapshot of the multilevel process that went into creating Caesar.

Click Here Watch Now ====>> Oscars Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Online Free Tv PC

Director Rupert Wyatt and character designer Aaron Sims designed the character with some real-world reference, though Visual Effects supervisor Letteri notes that they wanted to give Caesar "a bit more nobility... to stand out a little bit more from the other apes." The effects team looked at real chimpanzees, "videotaping them constantly, looking at what they do and what their expressions are." Meanwhile, Serkis -- no stranger to primates after his titular role in King Kong -- was doing his own chimp research.

Oscars 2012: Get the latest news, photos, and more

That labor-intensive first shot of Caesar took roughly six to eight months. "The character design was done as a sculpture," Letteri explains. "Then there was some PhotoShop done on top of that, and then we built a 3-D model. We got Andy to do a bunch of recorded performances, so that we could explore a full range of performance motions in Caesar. At the same time, we were building all the details of the character. The skin. The eyes. The fur. Those first six to eight months are all about finding the character."

Letteri has worked with Weta throughout the evolution of performance-capture technology. (He actually already has four Oscars, for The Two Towers, Return of the King, King Kong, and Avatar. "My first one, I keep up on the mantelpiece at home, just to be traditional," he notes. "The other three I have in my office.") "The real breakthroughs for us are what we learn about characters and creatures over the years," he notes. "What makes eyes really look like eyes? It's not the eyes themselves, though they're obviously a big part of it. It's the whole area around the eyes, how the eyelids and the muscles respond. You look at the eyes, but you interpret outward from there." For that reason, the team decided to make Caesar's eyes more humanlike. "We needed audiences to be able to understand what he was thinking right off the bat, even when he was an infant."

All that hard work produced that memorable shot of Caesar scanning around his cell. "You see this sideways glance. You just know something's going on behind his eyes, and you don't know what it is. Those moments, where it's just in the eyes, are where you find the character. And that was all Andy coming through." The success of that first completed shot also explains why it appeared so prominently in the advertising: Says Letteri, "The reason that shot was in the trailer is that it was the only one that was done!"

Compare the first shot of Serkis to the final shot of Caesar here, and, for more Oscars-related intel, see live video from behind the scenes at the awards at oscarsacademyawards.com

Each new Oscars season binds us all together as one, in a collective, sputtering state of exasperation. How could they fail to nominate so-and-so? Are you telling me that so-and-so deserved a best actress or best supporting actor Academy Award nomination any less than thus-and-so? Say it isn't so.

I have three names, chief among many others, to throw in the ring of the unnominated.

No. 1: Robert Forster, "The Descendants." The beauty of director Alexander Payne's film, which he co-adapted from Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel, lies in its underlying generosity even when the characters are being foolish or ridiculous. Forster portrays the gruff father of the woman in a coma, the woman married to George Clooney's prosperous but fraught lawyer/landowner. In other hands, and with a less astute character actor, the father figure would be just that: a figure, a foil, rather than a dimensional creation.

Click Here Watch Now ====>> Oscars Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Online Free Tv PC

But when Forster finds his moments to reveal the man's breaking heart -- he is losing a daughter, and he blames his son-in-law -- without shoveling the pathos, Payne and Forster conspire to complicate our feelings about the man. Also, he's very funny. The way he states "I'm going to hit you now" before popping his granddaughter's wastrel pal Sid in the face is so perfect, it's actually a step beyond perfect.
Academy Awards Live Stream
Forster received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his career-resurrecting role as the bail bondsman in Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" (1997). But his work in "The Descendants" is no less choice.

No. 2: Yun Jung-hee, "Poetry." The South Korean actress, whose name and face you probably don't know, hadn't worked (by choice) in nearly 20 years when she starred in my favorite film of 2011. In writer-director Lee Chang-dong's drama, she plays a pensioner raising her teenage grandson. The woman is Academy Awards Live Stream with early-onset Alzheimer's, as well as the news that her grandson is guilty of a terrible crime. Yun delineates the crisscrossing lines of her character's psyche with such gorgeous ease that a potentially melodramatic series of crises becomes an occasion for something like true catharsis.

It could be worse. That's what film critic Stephen Whitty will tell himself as the 84th Annual Academy Awards ceremony stumbles into Hour Two, or maybe even Hour Three of their endless telecast. All week, he will be looking back at some of Oscar's worst moments.

WORST MUSICAL NUMBER

Yes, it's tempting to bring up that Rob Lowe duet with Snow White back in 1989. Again. (Did I mention it went on for more than ten minutes? And also featured Vincent Price? And Merv Griffin singing "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts"?)

But no, that would be unfair. Besides, that already made the "Worst Opening Number" category.

So let's Dumpster-dive a little deeper for this one. Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Particularly when Academy voters spent rock's best years ignoring bands like the Beatles while nominating stuff like "Chim, Chim, Cher-ee."

Click Here Watch Now ====>> Oscars Academy Awards 2012 Live Stream Online Free Tv PC

Or then finally decided to overcompensate by having Three 6 Mafia on in 2006, performing "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp" -- a rap song destined to be a ring tone for talent agents everywhere.

But the all-time worst number ever wasn't a nominated song.
Watch Oscars 2012 Online
It came courtesy of actress and choreographer Debbie Allen who, for some reason, had been in charge of the Oscar performances for years, including those awful production numbers and pointless dance "interpretations" of categories like best costume or score.
And she reigned pretty much unquestioned until, during the 1999 show, she brought out people dressed up as the soldiers Watch Oscar 2012 Online "Saving Private Ryan." And had them go into a dance. With, um, some sort of tapper twisting around, Fosse-like, in front. Yeah!
It's hard to explain, precisely. And - like that Lowe number - it seems to have been pushed down the memory hole, scrubbed from any appearances on YouTube by vigilant
Academy guardians.