The red carpet is incredibly disorienting. When you are on the red carpet all you hear are screams. All you see are fans at the side with their books open, begging for an autograph, screaming. Stacks upon stacks of photographers, yelling at everyone. And the never-ending flashing of light.
So while you saw something like this:
Redmayne and Bagshawe saw the cameras like this:
Are the people who walk down the red carpet better mannered than the people who are watching the red carpet from the other side? No. They spend the entire time taking photos of famous people walking down the red carpet alongside them. The only way in which being on the red carpet is better than being on the other side is that you are a metre closer. You become one of those people who looks 78% of the time through your phone screen.
I didn't realise until later that I was on TV, I didn't stop staring at the camera, and I looked like a stalker.
Then I went inside and found my seat. This is what the auditorium looked like from above.
This is what the countdown clock looked like for the award winners, designed to alert them if their speech went on for too long.
Just about everyone managed to not overrun their speech. Patricia Arquette completed her speech for Best Supporting Actress as the clock passed exactly zero. I was hoping that her hitting the mark would result in something exciting, like lazers or something, but alas the screen just faded to black.
The countdown clock also showed the script for Stephen Fry and anyone who introduced a category. This meant that if you were sitting where I was, you spent 80% of time looking at the autocue mouthing the words, or trying to read faster than them.
Julianne Moore managed to sum up what everyone was thinking in the audience the whole time.
As the red carpet started at around 5 pm, and the ceremony kicked off shortly after 6, nobody had eaten for hours. This was made worse by the fact that dinner was not going to be until midnight and everyone was sobering up from drinking a considerable amount of champagne from two in the afternoon.
At one point I went off to have a big wee and discovered another problem. You are not allowed to re-enter the auditorium unless they are showing a video on stage, in case your re-entering interrupts a speech.
Lesson: If you want to be big in film you must learn to wee INFREQUENTLY.
It was then dinner at Grosvenor House, where dinner was presented on a table that looked like this.
Here was the table based on Birdman.
This is what Serge's tail looked like, by the way.
So @KasabianHQ are wearing furry tails #EEBAFTAs
Just in case you needed to know: His tail was really quite soft.
Many of the celebs were there for dinner. They then disappeared all at once, off to their various afterparties whilst the rest of the people went downstairs to a ballroom.
And around that moment, everyone stole as much as they could from their dinner table.
You might think, Why steal? Well a lot of the things on the night, like the tablemats and the decorations, were specifically made and themed for the occasion. By taking it home, you were essentially taking something to fondly remember the evening by.
My tablemat was a photo of Ellar Coltrane from Boyhood. It's pretty hard for a hotel to use that tablemat again, when you think about it.