When we found out that Sam Wasson, author of Fifth Avenue, 5 AM, was invited to attend this year’s Academy Awards, we turned green with envy. But since we couldn’t be there ourselves, Sam was gracious enough to give us the scoop on the night’s festivities.

Q: What did you think of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin as hosts? Dynamic duo or awkward pairing?

A: What’s not to love? Though they did seem under rehearsed and under used, more like mascots than actual hosts. I mean where were they when we needed them most, during the Ben Stiller incident and that horrific horror montage? The host or hosts have the responsibility of making the show feel like an actual event as opposed to a series of loosely connected episodes. This year, the Oscars didn’t have that.

Q: What were your Oscar award predictions and how did they play out? Do you think the usual Oscar award “politics” were at play this year?

A: My Oscar predictions played out pretty much as I thought with the exception of Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Foreign Film. I know it’s become fashionable to put down on Jason Reitman, but I thought he (and his collaborators) wrote a terrific script, and were very clever about when and how much they delivered on genre. The Academy loves an 80% old-fashioned movie, and that’s just what Up in the Air is. I can’t say I was that surprised to see Sandra Bullock win the Oscar for Best Actress, considering the Academy’s penchant for honorably discharging Meryl Streep. I never thought I’d say this about the greatest living actress, but I’m actually beginning to feel sorry for her. Julia Child was far from her best, but it was leagues ahead of the others. And finally, I was shocked out of my cummerbund when The White Ribbon lost Best Foreign Film. It was the strongest in the category, and it had all the momentum a winning film could have. Were politics at play? Absolutely. No matter what Mo’Nique says.

Q: Hurt Locker vs. Avatar. The underdog basically stole the show this year. Was the Best Picture win a triumph of story and direction over special effects and beautiful cinematography?

A: The Best Picture win was a triumph of many, many things, aesthetic and otherwise, the most significant of which, as everyone knows, is Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar. But I wouldn’t call either of them an underdog. Both films showcased mind-blowing feats of direction, and both were beautifully shot (though I’m still uncertain about how cinematography fits into Avatar’s largely CGI universe), and well received. The underdog – and to my mind the best picture of the year – was The Coen Brothers’ film, A Serious Man.

Q: The Oscars featured a moving tribute to the films of John Hughes. What do you think it is about his movies that people love so much?

A: John Hughes respected his characters. More than that, he got to the strangeness of being young, and – here’s the feat – he made it relatable. No matter what, Hughes took all of his people seriously, and that, when dealing with teenagers – who are so often marginalized in cinema as well as life – is a wonderful, wonderful thing. He also understood the many kinds of teenagers from the jock to the nerd to the hot girl and onward, types everyone could relate to. It gave his films immediacy. But rather than paint them with broad strokes, Hughes always gave his characters a touch of contradiction or darkness or unforeseen humor that helped them to defy the limitations of their type. That right there is so much of what his films (and growing up) are (is) about: breaking type. People love his films because no matter who they are, Hughes loved them. And when you’re fifteen or sixteen, falling in love, out of love, scared, or alone, that’s no small thing.

Q: Who were the best dressed? Worst dressed? Did you get a swag bag? Who did you get to schmooze with after the show?

A: Sandra Bullock knocked my socks off. If only we had met later, she might have knocked off even more. And Vera Farmiga! VERA! FARMIGA! Holy Mackerel! She looked like a present I wanted to give myself over and over again. After the show, I got to schmooze with the liveliest bunch of rascals in the room, the editors and the documentarians. (Word of advice: at awards shows, always hang out with the editors and the documentarians. Actors are distracted by other people, directors are distracted by themselves, and writers are distracted by the buffet, but editors and the doc-makers are always present. Along with cinematographers, they see the bigger picture.) I quite literally bypassed Charlize on my way to Lynne Littman, Rob Epstein, Richard Pearce, Lynzee Kingman, and Mark Goldblatt. I got no swag. Only the happiest hangover of my life.

Read more about the Oscar’s on Sam Wasson’s blog. His book Fifth Avenue, 5 AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman will publish in July 2010.

Book City Jackets, a Brooklyn-based company, designs and sells these lovely brown paper book jackets. Their motto? Make every book beautiful. We couldn’t agree more.

Scanning one of those ubiquitous holiday gift guides the other day, I came across this contraption. Sign of the times?

A week before Thanksgiving a mysterious package arrived for me at work. A festive green card was taped to the top and little foodie oil spots dotted the cardboard sides. One thing was certain: the box was heavy with something yummy inside. Harvey, the messenger who brought it up to me, watched eagerly as I opened the box on the spot (He wanted see if his guess of chocolate cake was right — apparently, the messenger center had a bet going). Lo and behold, a beautiful batch of two dozen chocolate chip cookies to celebrate my first acquisition: Cara & Phoebe’s Quarter-Life Kitchen. 

Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine are the creators of Big Girls, Small Kitchen, the food blog that had our mouths watering for months before the pair came in to pitch their book. We were inspired by their sophisticated take on childhood classics like Pesto Mac ‘n Cheese and Pancakes with Pomegranates. Cara and Phoebe’s book will tell the story of their friendship (they’ve been cooking together since a middle school bake-off) complete with recipes and a foreword by Ina Garten. 

We’re super excited about this book — and so are our stomachs. What else can I say? It was love at first bite. 

p.s. Check out the recipes for Cara and Phoebe’s scrumptious book deal cookies. We chomped through those babies in less than two days and I don’t think the janitor was too happy about all the crumbs we left behind…

Jonesin’ for a chili-cheese smothered Tubby Dog or a peanut butter glazed Elvis donut topped off with banana slices and bacon? Jones no more. This Is Why You’re Fat, the book, hits stores in just a few weeks and while it may not fully satisfy your growling stomach, it will at least tantalize your hungry eyes! Look out for the local faves listed below in a neighborhood near you. A deep fried Mars bar may be only a stone’s throw away.

Illustration by Zach Kanin

For the last few weeks I’ve been eating, breathing, and sleeping with The Beatles on the brain–but with good reason. We’re publishing You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles by Peter Doggett, a British journalist and rock historian, which is slated to come out Summer 2010. As the title suggests, the book explores in meticulous detail the events that lead up to the break-up and the eventual collapse of their cooperative experiment, Apple Corps. 

Lucky for us, even though the group disbanded nearly four decades ago, The Beatles are back! Today marks the release of the highly anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band, along with remastered versions of The Beatles’ entire discography. There is something magical about listening to this montage of Beatles classics and watching the Fab Four come back to life. And of course, I can’t wait to rock out (virtually) at The Cavern or in a field of psychadellic, LSD inspired flowers. Rock bands may come and go, but The Beatles never die.

p.s. John Lennon would be happy to know that Beatlemania 2.0 would make its resurgence on 09/09/09 – his lucky number was 9!

Last year we blogged about the success of Radiohead’s pay-as-you-wish album In Rainbows. Looking to the music business as a model, publishers and authors are also starting to grapple with the concept of giving content away for free. It was a nice surprise to see in PW Daily the other day that Robert Kiyosaki has done a similar experiment with his upcoming book Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich. 

While not exactly a pay-as-you-wish scheme, what he did was release the book in one-chapter installments as free downloads on his website over the course of a year. Now that all the installments are in, the book will be released as a paperback by Grand Central on September 8 with a first printing of 150,000. The jury may still be out until real sales numbers come in, but so far, with over 90,000 registered readers on his website, it sounds like Kiyosaki may end up as the next Radiohead success story.

Check out Bob’s recent piece on PublishingPerspectives.com about why the relationship between Publisher and Author should be a collaboration, not a tug-of-war.

photo credit: Adrian Kinloch

I’ve just read M.J. Rose’s editorial from last Friday, “Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid,” and I couldn’t agree more that it’s time to re-think the publisher/author relationship.  M.J. deserves credit for moving this conversation forward; indeed, for years M.J. has shown by her own example how authors can and should be full partners in the marketing of their books. If anyone has earned the right to question author compensation, it’s M.J. Rose.

However, I don’t think that the solution is to have authors paid a higher royalty in exchange for their marketing efforts.

First of all, how would this be judged? What amount of marketing effort should be expected of the author before their royalty changes?  Shouldn’t author and publisher alike be doing everything possible to make a book succeed, without needing to count up who has gone beyond the call of duty and who hasn’t and trying to calculate how that should translate into how they share the proceeds of their success? What if the author and the publisher have both made herculean marketing efforts, but the book has lost money? Should the author get a higher royalty, even as the publisher is taking a loss? (Similarly, I don’t see how publishers and authors would know how to apply the author’s marketing expenses to their advances, as M.J. suggests here.)

There’s been a lot of commotion in the publishing world about the Google Book Settlement in the last year, but it wasn’t until a friend sent me this link that I realized I had never explored Google Books and didn’t even know how to use it!

For all of you out there who are just like me, spend a little time figuring out how to search books by playing the Google Books Game. The actual game ended last week (each day the top three submissions were rewarded with Sony Readers), but you can still play for fun and test your book knowledge. The questions are a bit challenging, but luckily, even if you don’t know the answer you can still take advantage of Google’s gold mine of literary references.

One of the fun parts of working on books here at HarperStudio is getting to see the wonderfully creative covers our Art department designs. Coming up with the right cover concept for a book is definitely an art–it’s harder than it looks! In Newsweek’s book issue, Chip Kidd offers a few of his favorite covers.

What are your favorite covers? Share some with us in the comments section.