Every year, on the Sunday morning of the Oscars, Rick Rosas likes to pore quietly over the media's Oscar predictions. It's ''a perverse pleasure'' for him, he says, because by then, Rosas — a bigwig at Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, the Academy's accounting firm for the last 71 years — has spent the past few days tallying the official results, and he's one of two or three people in the world who know who's actually won. ''I love reading through ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S predictions and saying, 'Wrong. . .wrong. . .way off base!''' he chuckles. ''I have fun with that.'' (For the record, a-hem: We went eight for eight in the main categories this year.)
It's the only moment all Oscar week when the professional stone-face isn't all business. Don't bother asking Rosas who came in second (''I make it a point to have short-term memory loss on that one'') or even what his favorite movies from last year were (''I won't disclose that''). And he'll never reveal — even to the Academy president — the ''undisclosed location'' where the firm adds up the results. ''But it's not like I'm Dick Cheney going underground,'' he promises. ''I've never been in a helicopter; it's not like NORAD.''
The Oscars, it turns out, are tabulated much the same way that your high school's race for class president was: by a half-dozen math geeks armed only with pencils, paper, calculators, and a pile of ballots in a windowless conference room. ''Rolls-Royce still makes cars by hand, and we still count ballots by hand,'' says Rosas, who's been Oscar-tallying since 2001. ''It's part of our heritage working with the Academy.'' No talking is allowed, nobody breaks for lunch (it's delivered), and they all tabulate one category at a time over the course of three 12- to 16-hour days. To make way for a trainee, Rosas didn't sit on the side of the stage this year to hand out envelopes to presenters. Instead he actually watched the show with the rest of the Kodak Theatre audience, after walking the red carpet with all the Pricewaterhouse wives, including his own. And today, ''I'm back to being a regular tax accountant,'' he reports, a bit wistfully. ''It's that time of year now.''
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