OSCAR'S UNGUARDED MOMENTS; PHOTO ESSAY CATCHES CELEBS IN ACT OF BEING THEMSELVES.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Look, it's Mel Gibson, smirking like a 10-year-old with a fistful of firecrackers as he crouches in a hallway clutching one of his ``Braveheart'' Oscars.

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And there's Uma Thurman, pensively absorbed in a cigarette backstage after losing her bid for Best Supporting Actress.

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Outside the Shrine Auditorium, Tim Robbins banters with Muhammad Ali. In rehearsals, Whoopi Goldberg hams it up with Miss Piggy. A euphoric-looking David Helfgott (is he ever otherwise?) hugs his wife outside their makeup trailer, while movie critic Roger Ebert, resplendent in black tie, pounds down caffeine and bangs out a deadline story.

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To see the Academy Awards through Lara Jo Regan's lens is to see a parallel drama, a surreal and ironic pageant largely hidden from millions of TV viewers.

In 1994, when Premiere magazine first assigned the L.A.-based photographer to go behind the scenes of Hollywood's annual glam-in, it wasn't just looking for peekaboo shots of the rich and fabulous.

The idea behind the project, Regan explains, was to capture the frenetic work that goes into creating a seamless television fantasy, to record some extremely privileged people in moods that any Jane or Joe could identify with - exhilaration, fatigue, disappointment, relief.

Unlike, say, a Broadway musical or a big-budget film, the Oscar ceremony gets thrown together in just four or five days. Deadlines are tight. Performance anxiety looms like a badly marked freeway exit. Hundreds of workers, from valet-parking attendants and caterers to dancers and TV techies, must be carefully choreographed.

Premiere wanted Regan to convey that warp-speed process, the 96-hour countdown to Oscar night. The result has become one of the magazine's best-read issues.

Four years later, as Regan prepares to cover her fifth Academy Awards ceremony, she says her intention once again will be to ``de-mythologize'' the Dream Factory's big bash without debunking it. In covering Hollywood, she wants to steer a middle path between the worshipful iconography of George Hurrell-style ``glamour'' portraiture, and the deer-in-the-headlights, gotcha! journalism of the paparazzi.

``The last thing in the world I'm interested in is exploiting celebrities,'' says Regan, whose one-woman photo essay, ``Behind the Scenes at the Oscars,'' opens today at the art gallery of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

``I don't think a shot of Sharon Stone with her bra strap showing would be interesting, which would be a typical paparazzi shot. Visual gossip to me is the least interesting thing. I don't want to sound holier than thou, but that just goes against everything I'm doing as a photographer. Once you start doing that, you lose your credibility very fast, and no one will trust you.''

To meet Regan at her creatively cluttered Los Feliz apartment is, instinctively, to trust her. Like her home, casually festooned with art and flea-market antiques, Regan's personality seems both open-ended and discriminating.

A friendly, forthcoming woman in her mid-30s, she's dressed head to toe in thrift-shop black, with short hair tinted a shade of red so fierce that it's almost purple. At certain angles, she looks a bit like a young Loretta Swit.

``I get so busy that I don't have time to shop anymore,'' she says in an unconcerned voice. ``People ask what I'm wearing to the (gallery) opening and I don't know. Lucky thing my mom's not going to be there. My mother saw me on TV last year and started getting on my case for what I was wearing. And I said, `Mom, I'm working!' ''

Ah, yes, Mom - that grand dame of cultured Philadelphia society, a woman whose formidable hostessing skills taught her daughter everything she needed to know about schmoozing with fat cats.

``She's just one of those really creative mothers, that just manifested itself in decorating'' and throwing parties and charity benefits, Regan says. ``She has a very theatrical sense. She (is) wonderfully nuts. I think people who become creative grew up in theatrical families. They have a sense of drama.''

It was Regan's own sense of inherent drama that initially caught the eye of Premiere photo editor Charlie Holland, who conceived the Oscars project.

For the assignment, Holland knew she needed a shooter of taste and tact, someone who could elbow her way through a party without spilling the champagne.

Holland was particularly impressed with a photo spread Regan had done on Hollywood's homeless teen-age squatters. Though its subject matter seemed miles removed from Oscar night, Holland admired the way Regan had infiltrated a shadowy urban subculture and recorded its denizens with uncondescending compassion.

``She had to be very self-confident technically, and I believed she (Regan) was,'' says Holland, now director of photography for Tony Stone Images in Los Angeles. ``She had to be very good socially so she would not antagonize anyone around her, so that she could deal with being told `no,' so that she could abide by the rules being set down, which takes an enormous amount of discipline for a photographer.

``An assignment like this, it sounds terribly petty for anyone who's ever covered a war or anything like that, but it really requires a very mature person because there's so much at stake for all the participants.''

Still, the academy was wary. Why expose the duct tape behind a perfect illusion?

In return for granting uprecedented backstage access, the academy laid down a few ground rules: No advance leaking of pictures. No photos depicting any flaring tempers or tacky displays of ego.

``They had to be terribly trusting of us,'' says Holland. ``Given that you have four days to put on a show that's going to be seen by 200 million people, that's going to create pressure; that's going to create some conflict. They did not want that recorded. I don't blame them.''

Even so, Regan went where no photographer had gone before. Of the hundreds of pictures she took, 55 are in the current exhibition.

She roamed the dressing rooms and invaded the fabled ``Green Room,'' where stars suck Perrier between rehearsals. She discovered an off-stage kitchen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Oscar statuettes were stored alongside hanging salamis.

She stumbled upon Chris Farley, manically hugging a giant disco ball, and sneaked into an elevator with Martin Landau and Mira Sorvino, on their way to the press rooms after winning Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress awards.

Nearly everywhere she went, suspicious security guards and jealous press agents blocked her path.

``Being backstage at the Oscars, even with clearance, with a camera, it's hard not to feel like a virus and everyone else is a white blood cell,'' Regan says. ``I had to really push for the things I wanted. I had to push for and previsualize them.''

Despite her easygoing manner, Regan knows how to push.

After following a boyfriend to L.A. when she was 24, Regan had a brief, unsuccessful fling with screenwriting. She then turned to photography, shooting for the now-defunct L.A. Reader.

Her strong photographic viewpoint eventually gained notice from national publications. For the past seven years she's been a regular contributor to Time and Newsweek and also shoots for Entertainment Weekly, Life and other publications.

``It's like acting,'' she says of free-lance photography. ``It's highly competitive. There are so many people that want to get into it, that will do anything to get into it.''

Regan first got into it as a 15-year-old, snapping away with an Instamatic while accompanying her grandmother on a trip to Hawaii. But for years she considered it a hobby, choosing to study anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

To help meet her college costs, she began shooting for the local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera. After graduation, she took a job as a curatorial photographer for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

``I was, like, photographing pots for their records and, occasionally, some academic article. Three thousand Pueblo pots later, I really missed photojournalism.''

Having happily escaped her presumed destiny as a Philadelphia debutante, Regan now finds herself in the strange position of becoming a quasi-celebrity herself. Recently, when she was interviewed by a certain VIP-obsessed TV show, the bubbly hosts begged her to dish the dirt.

So what really goes on behind Oscar's back? Didn't she have any good Madonna anecdotes?

Regan finds the contemporay mania for celebrity ``kind of sad.'' But if more candid Hollywood photography were allowed, she thinks, maybe the rest of us wouldn't need our daily fix of sensationalism.

``The thing about the Oscars, too, I know a lot of the really good independent films didn't get nominated, but it really does celebrate the best this industry has to offer,'' Regan says.

``There's times when you're back there and there's this beautiful music playing and these incredible clips on the screen, and all the celebrity stuff goes out of your mind and you're reminded what an amazing art form film can be.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Behind the Scenes at the Oscars: Photographs by Lara Jo Regan.''

Where: Through April 12 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; noon to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

Admission: Free. For information, call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

10 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) On the cover: Best Supporting Actress Mira Sorvino and Best Supporting Actor Martin Landau share an elevator ride to meet the press at the 1996 Oscars.

(2--Color) ``A committed Oscar fan - or maybe an Oscar who should be committed,'' comments photographer Lara Jo Regan.

(3--Color) Workers set up for the Governors Ball, the traditional, exclusive soiree following the Academy Awards.

(4--Color) A guard rail keeps the hoi polloi at bay, while some would-be VIPs scope out each other.

(5--Color) Even the canine escorts look debonair at the traditional pre-Oscar fashion show.

(6--Color) Got some ID, buddy? Not even bona fide celebrities like Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman can sneak into the Oscars without proper credentials.

(7--Color) The morning after: A veteran photojournalist surveys the press-room wreckage after another Oscar telecast.

(8) A camera seems to be sneaking up on emcee Billy Crystal during rehearsals.

(9) A dinosaur head from ``Jurassic Park,'' being used to present a special-effects Oscar, finds temporary refuge in a sound studio.

(10) Regan

Photographs by Lara Jo Regan