BEVERLY HILLS, California, Feb 7, (Agencies): George Clooney says the best thing about Academy Awards nominations is not necessarily the prizes. It’s hanging with old and new friends. At the annual Oscar nominee luncheon Monday, Clooney said he’s made new pals on the awards circuit this season and has been happy to catch up with longtime friends such as Viola Davis and Brad Pitt, his co-star in the “Ocean’s Eleven” movies. “A lot of people at home think we all hang out together. I think they think we’re always at the Hilton. The truth is I hadn’t seen Brad in about a year” until they crossed paths around the time of January’s Golden Globes, Clooney told reporters before sitting down to lunch. “So it’s fun to catch up, and it’s fun to see people I like and haven’t seen in a long time.”

Both are up for the best-actor Oscar – Clooney for “The Descendants” and Pitt for “Moneyball.” Clooney said he also has had fun getting to know other nominees such as best-actor contenders Gary Oldman of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” Jean Dujardin of “The Artist” and Demian Bichir of “A Better Life.” Pitt joked that like Clooney, awards season has allowed him to make a lot of new acquaintances. “I met this guy named George,” Pitt said, stumbling over the pronunciation of the name, “G-g-george, Jorge Clooney. Very nice guy. Very personable and very nice guy.” Along with Clooney and Pitt, others among the 150 nominees at the luncheon included “The Help” co-stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer; “Albert Nobbs” co-stars Glenn Close and Janet McTeer; “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” star Rooney Mara; “My Week with Marilyn” co-stars Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh; “The Artist” co-star Berenice Bejo; and “Hugo” director Martin Scorsese.

Getaways
Davis, who appeared in Clooney’s “Out of Sight” and “Solaris,” has been such good friends with the superstar that he invited her and her husband to spend their honeymoon at his villa in Italy. She recalled having four- and five-course meals a day as the only guests at his 22-room home. But Davis said such romantic getaways and the glamorous get-ups she puts on for awards shows are not part of her daily life. “If you guys could see me when I’m at home with my cornrows,” Davis said. “I am not a glam woman. This definitely is a mask I put on for the public. My biggest fear is that paparazzi with some, like, lens is going to come into my backyard and see me when I get in my pool. That would be very unfortunate.”
Six-time nominee Close recalled coming to the Oscar luncheon when she was first nominated for 1982’s “The World According to Garp” and “being astounded that I met some people who were really almost hyperventilating as to whether they were going to win or not. And I have never understood that, because you just do the simple math.”
Close weighed being one of five best-actress nominees against the astronomical odds against success in show business, with the number of actors out of work at any given time and the sheer number of movies made each year.

“And then you’re one of five,” Close said. “How could you possibly think of yourself as a loser?”
Spencer, the supporting-actress front-runner, said she still remains star-struck being in the same room with superstars she has admired during a long career toiling in small TV and film roles before her breakout performance in “The Help.”
“It’s just a bunch of really normal people who happen to be named Glenn Close and George Clooney and Brad Pitt,” Spencer said. “Sometimes, you just find yourself ogling them. I still do. I think I’ve kind of mauled everyone thus far.”
Though she’s new to the Oscars, Spencer has old friends herself among the field. She and fellow supporting-actress nominee Melissa McCarthy, a rare contender in a mainstream comedy for “Bridesmaids,” have been pals for years.
McCarthy said the whirlwind of her Oscar success has made her reflect on her early career, struggling to land a TV commercial or two a year so she would not have to go back to waiting tables.

Surreal
“It’s been a pretty amazing, surreal year,” McCarthy said. “I keep pinching myself, and I really hope I don’t get the call where someone says, ‘Kidding, kidding.’”
The menu for Hollywood’s most-exclusive lunch included chopped vegetable salad; hors d’ouevres featuring Indochina spiced beef and roasted Asian barbecue duck; a main course of Atlantic salmon; and sorbet with mango sauce and berries for dessert. Nominees also posed for a group photograph.
The next time the 2011 nominees will gather is on Oscar night Feb. 26. The 84th annual awards show will be televised live on ABC from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre. Brian Grazer, a producer of the broadcast, told the luncheon crowd that the Kodak will be redesigned to look like “a timeless movie theater.”

Facing a future where many movies will be seen in homes, Oscar organizers on Monday unveiled this year’s awards show theme at an annual luncheon honoring nominees by asking fans to relish memories of why they love movies and going to theaters. “Celebrate the movies in all of us,” is the idea that Academy Award co-producers Grazer and Don Mischer, as well as Tom Sherak, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, are asking film lovers to espouse this year. “I hope this theme is something you guys can celebrate with us,” Grazer told the audience of A-list Oscar nominees including Pitt, Clooney, Streep and Davis.

Grazer, producer of past best movie winner “A Beautiful Mind,” said that in these current days when more and more movies are delivered directly to homes via video-on-demand systems using the Internet, satellite and cable TV, it is time to remember the communal experience of shared laughter and emotion that people experience in a theater. To reinforce the theme, the academy has put a range of movie stars and beloved film roles on its Oscar poster — Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump” and Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in “Gone With the Wind,” among them — and Grazer said Oscar’s home stage inside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood would be “re-imagined” to look and feel like a movie theater. He said Oscar host Billy Crystal has a “fantastic film” to open the show, and Grazer and Mischer had only three goals for the ceremony that will take place on Feb. 26: be funny, show some class, and be on time. On that last note, Mischer admonished nominees to keep their speeches down to a brief 45 seconds, and he introduced a comical video in which Hanks tutored nominees on how to “make it short, make it simple (and) make it sincere” when it came to speeches.

The Oscar nominees lunch is a dressed-down affair compared to the tuxedos and gowns worn on Academy Award night, and it is a chance for lesser-known, but no less important, nominees such as David Vickery, who will vie for best visual effects with his work on “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2,” to rub elbows with top nominees such as Close (“Albert Nobbs”) or Michelle Williams (“My Week with Marilyn”). Jean Dujardin, star of silent movie-era romance “The Artist” and a rival of Clooney’s in the top acting category,” said that to him it was a “big deal” to be nominated but he was trying to avoid thinking too much about the possibility of winning. “I want to leave the element of surprise. I want to feel the emotion of it, I don’t want to anticipate it,” he said.