When I started watching the Oscars as a child in 1998, Billy Crystal’s presence felt as fundamental as the Oscar statue itself. Did I understand the jokes, such as when he sang about Titanic to the Gilligan’s Island theme? No way—but Crystal’s smirking tone and raised brows suggested we were all in on it. His unseriousness not only cut through the competitive tension of the night, but also acted as a kind of safety tether for his fellow movie actors: No matter how rude he got, Crystal was roasting Hollywood from the inside. He knew, better than many hosts since, that entertaining the audience outside the room depended on the energy of the stars inside it.

As the Oscars have fought for simultaneous memeable relevancy (remember Ellen’s selfie?) and artful prestige in the past two decades or so, the exact role the host should play has been unclear. Should they be clever-funny? Slapstick? Mean? Reverent? Without direction, the outcome has been chaotic: one-off hosts, two awkward hosts who don’t like each other, three hosts, no host whatsoever. I don’t understand this ongoing identity crisis. Though Crystal hasn’t graced the Oscars stage in a dozen years, his tenure illustrated the almost-ideal emcee: aware of the pressures of the industry, familiar with the films, friendly with the nominees, easygoing enough not to let a bad joke faze him and keen enough to know how to land a really good one. Perhaps today’s awards-show producers fear that Crystal’s style of old-fashioned showmanship would make the Oscars feel dated. I regret to tell them: The Oscars are already a vestige of a bygone era of Hollywood. Why not lean into it? A little song and dance never hurt anyone.

Crystal’s first monologue in 1990 was characteristic—apparent nervousness aside—of how he’d host the Oscars in years to come. “There are 300 feature films in that five-minute montage,” he said of the preshow segment, “and what’s amazing is that according to Paramount, not one has yet to go into profit.” Paramount—and the obscene wealth of Hollywood in general—was a frequent punch line for him, invoking, perhaps, the initial purpose of the Academy Awards themselves when they were started, in the late 1920s.

[Read: Hollywood’s dual strike is over, and the studios lost]

The early impetus for the Oscars was twofold: They reminded actors, directors, and writers that what they did was fun and important. They were also meant to keep the artists from organizing in an era of Hollywood labor disputes—solidarity was much more difficult when prizes were offered. The Oscars, Crystal explained during his most recent turn as host, in 2012, “celebrate a Hollywood tradition that not only creates memories for the ages but also breeds resentments that last a lifetime.” Though Crystal didn’t spell it all the way out, history shows that those grudges can range from the professional (Netflix versus the traditional studios) to the personal (actors making seemingly passive-aggressive comments about one another), stemming from the competitive nature of the awards. (That’s part of why it feels so disingenuous to hear winners thank their fellow nominees—for what, losing?) In short, the Academy Awards’ ability to divide and conquer worked for a number of years.

Recent hosts have reflected this division with a kind of a free-for-all negativity. Jimmy Kimmel seemed to have an air of smug distaste, while Seth MacFarlane went in a cruder direction with his “We Saw Your Boobs” song about female actors’ on-screen nudity. And the Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall trifecta stumbled through inconsistent chemistry as they, too, attempted to insult their peers. Hall set up a joke about how the coronavirus pandemic had been difficult for people, which Schumer followed with, “Just look at Timothée Chalamet!” as the camera cut to the older J. K. Simmons. These ad hominem attacks were essentially irrelevant to the awards, snuck in only for the sake of a lazy gag.

Crystal’s jokes about the stars could still be remarkably misguided: His use of blackface to imitate Sammy Davis Jr. in 2012 was particularly distasteful. But his primary target every year was the Academy itself. He doubled down on the absurd grandiosity of the contest. At his first Oscars, in 1990, he joked, “Six months ago, who would have possibly thought that the Berlin Wall would come down, that Nelson Mandela would be freed,” to rapturous applause, before adding, “and most incredibly, Meryl Streep would not be nominated for an Academy Award.” Crystal showed that, despite all of the Academy Awards’ viewers and pageantry, nominations and snubs meant little to those outside of that room.

[Read: Here’s who will win at the 2024 Oscars]

His jokes could take on the Oscars even more directly. “It’s great to be back here at the show,” Crystal said in 1997, “or as it’s known this year, Sundance by the Sea.” The oddest difference, according to him, was that in years past, “the major studios were nominated for Oscars.” This play on the studios’ increasing out-of-touchness (especially during the stodgy ’90s era when they favored trite melodramas) takes a swing at the industry, not any particular person. Few people have a greater public platform to call out those who make Hollywood’s business decisions. Simply put, Crystal punched up. What helped him get away with the jabs, beyond being a consummate showman, was that he clearly understood and held an appreciation for movies. Recent Oscars hosts such as Chris Rock and Neil Patrick Harris have done their turns on the big screen, but at the time when Crystal was hosting, he had spent most years, if not every other year, since the late 1970s making a movie.

This undercurrent of respect for the form, combined with Crystal’s dramatic skills, is perhaps best represented in his Oscars medleys, in which he skims through all the Best Picture nominees in a jokey musical number. He’s done one every year that he’s hosted, asking the audience, “You didn’t think I wasn’t gonna do this, did ya?” back in 2012. The songs have an unrelenting goofiness that clearly lightens the mood in the ballroom. The Oscars aren’t that serious, he seems to convey: These are just movies, those are just actors. Their plots and performances can be turned into musical jokes, and who is the butt of the joke more than Crystal himself? Song medleys and montages have long been a part of the Oscars, but Crystal’s take on the tradition was doing a silly, almost bad-on-purpose iteration, one that made him look like the clown with his strained rhymes and forced lyricism. You can’t help but root for him.

Whether or not Crystal ever gives hosting another shot, his past performances offer clues to what could make the next emcees great. Embodying the gleeful showman requires a degree of humility, one that celebrities seem to be less and less inclined to express. But so much about the Academy Awards is ripe for comedy––the desperate campaigns, the misleading pull quotes, the unsubtle For Your Consideration billboards. When the host embraces the absurdity of the awards season, they can yield delightful results. Headlining the Oscars doesn’t have to be impossible—it just requires someone who loves what they do as much as they love making fun of it.

Some people sing in the shower; I practice my awards speech instead. In it, like so many movie stars before me, I’m alternately breathy, teary-eyed, grateful to family, friends, and—who could forget—my team. I don’t remember learning about Hollywood, with all its warts and wonders, so much as I absorbed my love for it: I used to stay up past my bedtime to watch the Oscars, laughing at Billy Crystal jokes I didn’t understand. The glamor of awards shows and film sets mixed with the lurid tabloid affairs that lined grocery-store checkouts to create an intoxicating image of the industry. As a young person, I worried I’d only ever get a look at the real thing on a Hollywood Hills double-decker tour bus.

But thankfully, my fascination with the silver screen is not a solitary yearning, and writers have long unveiled its secrets and stories in books. For as long as we’ve had stars and motion pictures, we’ve published celebrity tell-alls and reported peeks behind the curtain, plumbing Tinsel Town for its greatest tales and pumping stars for their biggest confidences. The seven titles below, published across six decades, are some of the most memorable accounts of what Hollywood is really like—and they offer fans an authentic chance at seeing how the magic is made.

Harper Paperbacks

Oscar Wars, by Michael Schulman

The yearly circus of the Academy Awards is easy to cast aspersions on. Do the voters really pick the best movies of the year? Of course not. Are all of the winners the most deserving? Not often. Then why do so many viewers, casual movie fans and high-brow skeptics alike, pay so much attention? Schulman’s reported epic from last year makes a compelling case: The Oscars are Hollywood’s never-ending battle with itself. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as his book explains, was ostensibly founded to bring different branches of the industry together, but in practice was used to push against unions and dissent in the name of maintaining “harmony.” Schulman’s work follows the past century’s contentious Oscar races and awards narratives, and explores how the show has both changed and cemented all that is good and bad about the industry, from its inaugural party to, yes, “the Slap.” With every well-earned triumph (think Get Out) or less-than Best Picture winner (think Crash), the Oscars have made actors into stars, turned films into legends, and ushered a sense of urgency and excitement into the industry. Schulman proves that winning an Oscar does mean something, even if that something isn’t always “best.”

[Read: The unreality of Will Smith’s Oscars slap]

HarperOne

Finding Me, by Viola Davis

Davis is not infrequently considered one of the finest actors in the history of film and television. Many other actors’ memoirs fall victim to recounting petty anecdotes or leaning on emotional platitudes, but Davis’s solidifies all the good that can come out of a performing career. Finding Me details her poor upbringing and how she survived childhood abuse as she pushed to get herself out of Rhode Island and into Juilliard. The memoir chronicles the long years she spent in smaller parts in movies as she built up her theater bona fides through the 1990s and early 2000s, when the industry was enveloped in an overwhelming whiteness; it also offers an emotional account of Davis’s long struggle with the idea that she was not worthy of success. Her role as Annalise Keating on ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder was crucial to her development as both an actor and a Black woman, she writes. It became a signature part for her, despite ungenerous suggestions that she was perhaps too dark-skinned for the role. Davis is clear about what a game of chance making it can be, and that even though she’s talented and driven, she has been lucky. Her sharp and direct writing style oscillates between thankfulness and self-assertion as she sums up her time thus far: “Everything had been hard for me. I mastered hard. Now, I wanted joy.”

Simon and Schuster

Postcards From the Edge, by Carrie Fisher

Fisher was royalty in two senses of the word: Her mother was the great Debbie Reynolds, known best for her appearance in Singin’ in the Rain, and Fisher herself was perhaps most recognizable to millions (if not billions) of people for her role as Princess Leia in George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. Beyond her claim to the Hollywood throne, Fisher was known for her acerbic wit and frankness about the rough-and-tumble nature of the industry. Before her unexpected death in 2016, she was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, but her debut novel, Postcards From the Edge, remains one of her most meaningful contributions. The semi-autobiographical plot follows an actor struggling with drug addiction and recovery (Fisher’s own public battles are mirrored in those of protagonist Suzanne Vale), and the narration provides sharp, funny anecdotes—about how Vale’s manager wants her to do a TV series to manage her manias, for example, and how she copes with being a product of, and within, Tinsel Town (or at least, which drugs she takes to cope). The book is a loving punch-up, dark and biting, about how the film industry makes and breaks its own, but there’s nothing better than a comeback story. Upon finishing, you can enjoy Mike Nichols’s fantastic 1990 adaptation, starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

[Read: Remembering Carrie Fisher]

Penguin Books

Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris

Once you’ve read Fisher’s book and seen the subsequent film adaptation, you may find yourself curious about the life and career of the improv and stage comedian turned acclaimed director Nichols, whom Harris wrote about with great affection and detail in 2021. Harris has written three books on the film industry in the 20th century, all of them excellent, but the Nichols biography is perhaps the most resonant. It begins with the director’s early years in the Chicago improv scene with the actor and director Elaine May and moves to his role in achievements such as The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nichols worked with everyone––everyone! Elizabeth Taylor, Andrew Garfield, George C. Scott, and Julia Roberts are among the stars who pass in and out of the biography’s pages. Nichols’s projects varied from taut thriller to adult drama to broad comedy, and he operated in a range of genres that the major studios now struggle to make. Harris’s biography is not only a joyful (and gossipy) celebration of Nichols’s life and achievements, but a glimpse into a half century’s worth of films that are now on the verge of going extinct.

I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten, by Eartha Kitt

The actor, singer, and activist Eartha Kitt lived so storied a Hollywood life—including such moments as speaking out against the Vietnam War at a luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson—that the U.S. government found her singular celebrity threatening, and the CIA supposedly branded her a “sadistic nymphomaniac.” She did have a laissez-faire dating philosophy, but that label does a disservice to her work and her music, timeless as ever, as well as her friendships (or situationships, to borrow a modern term) with notable hunks such as James Dean and Paul Newman. She knew everyone, she talked with everyone, and she couldn’t wait to talk about it all. Kitt wrote three memoirs over the course of her adult life, but her last book, I’m Still Here, focuses on her relationships throughout the 1950s and ’60s and the rise and fall of her stardom. More than three decades later, I’m Still Here proves Kitt’s staying power as a diva and celebrity for the ages.

Dell

Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger

Anger, a director who started shooting films when he was only a kid, published his book Hollywood Babylon in 1959 (in France—it wouldn’t be widely released in the U.S. for years) to universal fascination and occasional repulsion. His controversial, gossip-laden tell-all was lurid and nasty, detailing the debauchery and violence of the first 50 years or so of Hollywood. (The tall tales and rumors perpetuated by Anger also served as the inspiration for much of the characterization in Damien Chazelle’s recent Babylon.) Anger was an industry outsider, making experimental queer films, and his disdain for Los Angeles is felt through every page. While much of Hollywood Babylon has been disproved in the years since its publication, it’s responsible for the longevity of a number of urban legends, such as Fatty Arbuckle’s supposed involvement in the death of an aspiring actress, and it arguably was a forebear of photo-hungry tabloids, like TMZ, that will stop at nothing to publish a less-than-savory shot. The “celebrity scandal” is now an industry unto itself, a reflex perpetuated by the internet and Notes-app apologies, but the business’s messy egos and frantic partying date all the way back to the early 20th century.

[Read: The dizzying debauchery of ]Babylon

Random House

You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

Phillips’s autobiography is a strong counterpart to Hollywood Babylon, as it focuses on the days of New Hollywood, which arose after the 1950s ended. She produced classics such as Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Sting, which made her the first female producer to accept the Academy Award for Best Picture. (Producers get to hold the Best Picture statue, as a thanks for the effort they put in, and the money they moved, to get the movie made.) The book shows how she and her husband, Michael, came up through the industry, including such experiences as Phillips’s story-editing tenure at Paramount, where she once mistook the famed producer Bob Evans for a hairdresser. It also provides a guide to all the ins and outs of what producers actually do (besides having their names come up first in the credits). Most of this job, at least for Phillips, is to make phone calls in which she plays hardball, oversells, or undersells; to read books that might make splashy pictures; and to take those titular lunches. Before the narrative spirals into drugs and addiction, Phillips crosses paths with all of the major players in 1970s Hollywood, and her writing offers a great inside look at the early years of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader (whom she refers to as nerds). It is a bracing read, unputdownable in every sense, and full of the cynicism and wonder that defined that era of filmmaking.