Dear Oscar: Please help. Everyone is miserable. We gave all our money to Bernie Madoff (or we may as well have). The warranty on the planet has expired and now the thermostat is broken. We need gongs. We need razzmatazz. We need million-dollar frocks. Please Oscar, give it all you've got this year! Forget everything we said about the Academy Awards being 1,000 years too long and attended only by preening narcissists.

We need it. We need you ...

It's OK to admit it: this is how you secretly feel about the 81st Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood tomorrow night. In times of rare crisis, it helps to have a familiar routine - even if it does include having to watch another Kate Winslet blubfest.

There's only one teeny problem: Hollywood is feeling as depressed as the rest of the former First World. It's raining here in southern California, for a start. Chucking it down. There's so much filth being washed off the Hollywood Hills and into the Pacific that if you went for a dip at the beach you'd emerge looking like that poor kid in the latrine sequence at the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire. It's like a day out at Wigan Pier. Oh, and did I mention the money? No one has any. Not a bean

And by not a bean, I mean that the entire state of California has gone bust. No kidding: this year's tax refunds are IOUs. Yet in spite of the apocalyptic chaos, a handful of post-Oscars parties are still bravely going ahead. The Vanity Fair bash (called off last year because of the writers' strike) is understandably making an effort to acknowledge the New Prudence. Graydon Carter, the magazine's long-time Editor, says that it “will be a much more intimate affair than in years past”. Alas, the Academy Awards' own Governors Ball isn't getting into the spirit: about 900 catering staff will be serving more than 500 bottles of champagne and handing out platters of lobster tails and oysters, plus pizza topped with black truffle and ricotta cheese.

Lunch, Santa Monica

“He came off as a very sad figure,” declares Caroline Graham, a former editor at Vanity Fair and owner of the PR firm C4 Global. “Although one shouldn't feel sorry for someone who has committed crimes, I felt his loneliness ...”

She is talking, of course, about the late Richard Nixon. I've known Graham for years - fellow Brit in LA, etc - but only recently discovered that in a former life she was Caroline Cushing, girlfriend of one Sir David Frost. She is played by the appropriately striking Rebecca Hall in the Best Picture-nominated movie Frost/Nixon, about Frost's almost comically Del Boy-ish attempt to spin a lucrative deal out of an exclusive post-Watergate interview with Nixon, conceived with little interest in actually getting a confession out of the man (or so Peter Morgan's script has it).

Graham, who lived in the Beverly Hilton with Frost while he worked on the project - and who attended the pre-interview negotiations with the impeached President while he was in exile in his Orange County mansion, La Casa Pacifica - enjoyed the movie, and confirms that Nixon used her as bait to wind-up Frost about all the “fornicating” he was doing. But she says it unfairly portrays her ex-boyfriend as a lightweight and a buffoon.

“David is a very intriguing person, very clever, unlike anyone I've ever met before,” she says. “He was possibly the best anchor in the world. There were no PRs in those days, remember. Yet David could just pick up the phone and have anyone he wanted on his show. There was no way anyone would talk to him or try to push him around like they do in the movie.”

Speaking of which: in the movie, Frost seduces Graham in the first-class cabin of a US-bound 747. I ask how they really met.

“I met David in Monte Carlo,” she recalls. “On our first date he flew me to Zaire, to see the Rumble in the Jungle [the historic Ali-Foreman fight].”

Regardless of how seriously people did or did not take Frost in the 1970s, I think that as first dates go that's pretty smooth.

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