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New book provides Oscar-winning puzzles

BY DANIEL BUBBEO | daniel.bubbeo@newsday.com

February 20, 2008

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What do "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Terms of Endearment" and "As Good as It Gets" all have in common? If you know jack about the Oscars, then you can figure out they're the three films for which Jack Nicholson won his Academy Awards.

Even if you missed that question, there are plenty of others to test your Oscar IQ in "So You Think You Know Oscar" (Dorrance, $9), a new book by East Hampton writer Gerald Granozio that combines his love of the movies with his passion for puzzles.

"This book was really a combination of two interests I've always had: the Oscars and puzzles. There are a lot of books out on there on the Oscars, but this one was different because it put those two interests together," Granozio said.

The range of puzzles covers everything from word searches of Oscar winners' names, crosswords, fill-in- the-blanks name games ("This two-time Oscar winner prefers to have his tea with __?" Answer: Lemmon), best picture anagrams, an All in the Oscar Family quiz on Oscar-winning relatives, and best of all, Calling All Oscar Call Girls, where you have to match actresses to the films in which they played hookers and went all the way to Oscar glory. (Although technically, Dorothy Malone, as a Texas oil tycoon's daughter in "Written on the Wind," was just a nymphomaniac.)

"I had all of the information at my fingertips," Granozio says. "Over the years, I've gathered a lot of information on the Oscars. So the whole book took about six months' research, and then I had to come up with the types of puzzles I wanted to include."

The Oscar aficionado says his favorite best picture winners were the '60s classics "A Man for All Seasons" and "Midnight Cowboy." But he still follows each year's ceremony closely and is already prepared for Sunday's Academy Awards. "My kids and I always see all the nominated films each year. Then we have ballots and we pass this statue around every year to the winner," he says.

And although one of Granozio's hobbies is reading tarot cards, he said that doesn't help him in picking the winners: "It doesn't work that way. Tarot-card reading is really more metaphysical."

SING THEIR PRAISES

Take a trivia quiz that appears in "So You Think You Know Oscar: Test Your Academy Award I.Q.," by East Hampton author Gerald Granozio (Dorrance, $9).

Match each Best Song winner with the movie in which it appeared:

1. "Into the West"

2. "You Must Love Me"

3. "Evergreen"

4. "Thanks for the Memory"

5. "The Continental"

6. "I'm Easy"

7. "I Just Called to Say I Love You"

8. "Last Dance"

9. "My Heart Will Go On"

10. "Sooner or Later"