The view from the Oscar bleachers

THEY MUST HAVE been tricked. Why else would people willingly sit in the bleachers overlooking the Oscar red carpet? Would you choose to show up at 7:30 in the morning, just to wait nine hours to watch other people walk into an event you’re not invited to? This was a scam I needed to expose. But perhaps not until closer to 11.

The first thing I learned upon arriving at the bleachers Sunday morning was that I was wrong. Way wrong. More than 15,000 people applied online last fall for a lottery for the 622 free assigned seats. I cannot understand what moral compunction keeps the academy from charging these people -- and then selling their information to people in Nigeria with Internet connections.

The bleacher sitters had flown in from across the country, and from Germany and Britain, just to see celebrities from 40 feet away. And -- this is the part that confused me the most -- they weren’t a bad-looking group of people. There were several women I would have been happy to sleep with were it not for the fact that it would be an embarrassing story of our first meeting: “I heard her shriek for Heath Ledger, and that’s when I knew your mom was the woman for me.”

The first celebrity to walk the carpet was Lisa Rinna, the “Melrose Place” actress and “Dancing with the Stars” runner-up, who did several laps of the carpet even though it turned out she was there not as an attendee but as an interviewer for “Access Hollywood.”

That was enough to get Roberta Roberts, who flew in from Mansfield, Mass., to start full-on bawling.

Roberts told me she was crying because Rinna was “so beautiful, and she deserved to win the dance contest.” It was the first time she had seen a celebrity, and she was overwhelmed. Then Roberts asked me to e-mail her about this column. When I told her I would, she hugged me and kissed me. And then hugged me and kissed me again.

“I think that’s so cool,” she said of my e-mailing generosity. “I’ll tell the girls at work I met you and we saw Lisa Reynolds.” I didn’t have the heart to correct her. But I did anyway. Roberts assured me that she knew Nicole Kidman’s name. Then she hugged me again.

Crying for Lisa Rinna paled in comparison to screaming sexual desire for Gary Busey. The very-normal-looking Judy Trottier, who flew in from Plano, Texas, explained, “He has been my dream since his first movie.”

“I see him, and I just want to touch him. If I wasn’t having sex with my husband, it would be Gary Busey,” she continued. When I asked her if she’d leave her husband of 15 years for Busey, she paused. “Yes and no,” she said. She made me touch her near her heart to show me how fast it was beating. Then I realized, if Gary Busey could get me to second base from 40 feet, maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing in him.

Perhaps even more excited about seeing stars was Mary Ann Kellogg, a school bus driver in Lowell, Mich., who was in the bleachers for a 12th year.

She’s part of a group of 35 people called the Oscar Chatter Group that, until the Academy Awards show moved to the Kodak Theatre, slept in tents downtown for a week to get their seats. It got up to 10 days as they competed to be first with their archrivals, the Bleacher Creatures. The Chatter Group has a newsletter and its own handmade awards, called the Elmers, for such accomplishments as “Best Husband, Wife and Grandchild.”

The groups have ended their feud because they are now given front-row tickets every year by the academy. But Kellogg said she misses the tents: “It’s boring now. We just get up at 7 and get in line. We were all together for a week.”

The academy treated its groupies well, keeping us fed and giving us a gift bag with a disposable camera. It provided a live interview show that was aimed just at us and included banter between Will Smith and Will Ferrell that was funnier than most of the presenter banter. The academy even invited us to the El Capitan Theatre to watch the show. I went home instead, having had too much of fawning over celebrities to sit through the Oscars.

The weird thing was that when I got home, I wished I’d gone. Not to watch the show, but to be with my new friends.

I have been part of the snarky, celeb-trashing industry for so long that these people seemed to be too simple: lacking in such fundamental traits as jealousy, schadenfreude and human dignity.

Then I remembered that a 14-year-old in the bleachers who’d seen me on E! asked me for my autograph. And I’m pretty sure he did it just to make me happy. And I wondered which side of the red carpet was suffering from a dignity deficit.