Malibu Denizens Keep Oscar Buzz to a Low Hum

The unwritten law in Malibu is that everyone is treated with equal indifference, whether you’re the movie star on the magazine cover or the store clerk who sells the magazine. “Celebrities are out here to be themselves, so you don’t call attention to them,� explains Malibu’s mayor pro tem, Carolyn van Horn.

The desire of its famous residents to maintain a low profile puts Malibu at odds with its very nature, like the landslides and wildfires that sometimes cast a hellish pall over this coastal paradise. So on the eve of the Academy Awards, in a town where city officials say as many as a third of its 11,000 inhabitants are entertainment industry insiders, there’s barely a mention of the big event. All is quiet on this Western front.

“Malibu is not a big hullabaloo place,� explains Jo Cosentino, who’s owned a flower shop in the city’s main shopping area for 25 years. “People are laid-back here. They want to get away from all that stuff that they’re surrounded with constantly. What they like about Malibu is that they can walk down the street in their beat-up jeans and nobody pays attention to them.

“The only thing you’ll notice is maybe about 3 or 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, it will get very quiet around here.�

Of course there are signs of Oscar life if you look in the right places. At Gemstar Limousine on Pacific Coast Highway, for example, the only limousine service based in Malibu, they’ve been preparing for weeks for the big event. All of the company’s 25 limousines have long been reserved.

Meanwhile, owner Lisa Paperny has been scrambling to help other customers find stretch cars from other companies outside Malibu. The company’s staff has been reviewing travel routes with its drivers, stocking the requested refreshments and preparing to give the cars a thorough washing on Oscar Sunday. Paperny knows, though, that the flurry of activity at her company makes her stand out.

“Malibu is just pretty low-key, no matter what,� Paperny says.

The one big Malibu Oscar party will be held at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita restaurant. General manager Jannis Swerman has worked for Puck for 17 years and remembers the gala Oscar evenings at his Spago restaurants in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. But when she came to Granita seven years ago, she hesitated to introduce a similar party in Malibu, not confident that enough people would turn out to make it profitable.

Now the restaurant’s Oscar event is in its third year and proving popular enough that more than 150 diners are expected. They’ll munch on Puck’s eclectic cuisine and cheer on their favorites while watching monitors placed throughout the restaurant. As far as Swerman is concerned, Malibu’s outward cool is merely a cover for an underlying passion for the annual awards ceremony.

“It’s a night in this town that’s like a national holiday,� she says. “It’s all people talk about.�

But if that’s the case, it’s hard to detect it on the streets of Malibu. Outside the town’s Civic Center, there’s a banner heralding an upcoming event--for a local school’s spring fair. According to the local paper, the one pre-Oscar gathering planned for the week is a highbrow lecture by a Pepperdine professor on the educational value of this year’s top films.

During the week, business was so routine at the Bernie Safire salon that one morning employee Bernard Daley took time to get his own pedicure. Daley says there was more excitement last year when local boy James Cameron sunk the competition with his “Titanic� epic.

The desire to keep a low community profile is so ingrained here that concerns were raised when this year a local group mounted the city’s first film festival. “There were a lot of mixed feelings about it,� says Arnold York, publisher of the Malibu Times.

“Half the people here want this to be a real town,� York says, “while the other half wants a bedroom community with an open road so they can zip in and out and then pull up the drawbridge at night and listen to the quiet of the ocean.�