I'm not really sure why I watched the Academy Awards the other night. I hadn't sat through them for years, and I don't think I had seen more than one or two of the movies that were nominated for anything this year. I saw "Toy Story 3" in a theater and I watched "The Social Network" on DVD. I have the DVD for "The Kids Are Alright," but I haven't watched it yet. I saw "True Grit" the first time around; just about the only movie I really want to see of this year's biggies is "The King's Speech."

Still, I enjoyed the show, which from what I've been reading leaves me in a distinct minority. In fact, for all the attacks on James Franco and Anne Hathaway, you'd think they had barbecued and eaten Mickey Mouse on stage.

Actually, watching the Oscars gave me a little bit of a homesick feeling for the first time since we left California four months ago.

[caption id="attachment_894" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Spotless Beverly Hills"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/3662071-a_typical_bh_street-Beverly_Hills.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-894" title="3662071-a_typical_bh_street-Beverly_Hills" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/3662071-a_typical_bh_street-Beverly_Hills-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

For some reason, it reminded me of the first time I saw Los Angeles in 1978. My first wife and I had driven down from San Francisco, and I remember that it was somewhere around Santa Barbara where I first started noticing the palm trees.

Of course I had seen them on television. So many of the shows I had grown up watching in the 1960s were set in Southern California, with its 350 days a year of sunshine. I was like most other American kids of that era, I suppose. We knew our  own hometown and we knew L.A., even though it was one of those exotic dream places that you couldn't actually <em>live</em> in.

The funny thing I remember from 20 years living there is that Los Angeles was what you wanted to make of it. You could do the whole California thing -- spending time at the beach, shopping in Beverly Hills, eating in fancy retaurants -- or you could pretty much ignore it.

For 18 years, I worked 50 miles inland from the ocean, and except for the nice California weather, my office could just as easily have been in Kansas or Kentucky.

I don't think I ever saw a star in a grocery store or restaurant the whole time I lived there, although I did have dinner with Squiggy in the press room at Dodger Stadium and I punked Larry King in the press box there on a different occasion.

I met a lot of stars while I was doing entertainment stories -- Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Drew Carey, Will Ferrell and the late Peter Ustinov (before he died), to name a few. I even met Eddie Haskell in Beverly Hills, which was sort of a surreal experience.

I only went to one Lakers game in 20 years, and I sat on press row for that one. Most of my insider stuff came from being a reporter and columnist, although I did manage to have a wonderful thrill -- twice, actually -- when I got front-row seats on the third-base side at Dodger Stadium. I took my son and his friends once and my daughter and her fiance the other time. When you love baseball, and you're that close to the field in one of the most beautiful stadiums in the world, that's a special moment.

[caption id="attachment_895" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="My last time at Dodger Stadium."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Dodger-Stadium-005.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-895" title="Dodger Stadium 005" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Dodger-Stadium-005-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

I tried to figure it out once, and I think I might have seen something like 200 baseball games at Chavez Ravine. I saw Fernando Valenzuela pitch his no-hitter in 1990, and I saw Atlanta's Kent Mercker pitch a no-hitter against the Dodgers a couple of years later.

Oddly, on some rare nights off in 1990 and 1991, I missed Kevin Gross pitching a no-hitter for the Dodgers and -- far worse -- I missed Montreal's Dennis Martinez pitching a <em>perfect game</em> against Los Angeles.

But I digress.

It's just that so much of what Los Angeles is to me is wrapped up in Dodger Stadium.

I definitely miss California, although for the most part I'm happy with our new home in Georgia. It's certainly wonderful to be living in a place where our home is completely paid for, and where our living expenses will be much lower than they would have been on the West Coast.

But I do love L.A., the Los Angeles of freeways and beaches, of the Industry -- only rubes call it "Hollywood" -- and all the gorgeous landscape.