About the author: Diana is the author of the Feminine Things blog. She works in the insurance industry to support her art projects and perfume habit, and at any given time is probably the best smelling person with a law degree in the Pacific Northwest.

I love movies.

Don’t get me wrong. I love television. I love books. I love live theater and concerts and musicals and live dance productions, from Bill T. Jones to the London Ballet Company. I even have affection for the symphony, the opera, and live ice skating.

But there is little I enjoy more than seeing a really good movie. This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will come together for the 83rd time to celebrate the movie industry’s best and brightest. And one of my friends, by virtue of a parental connection, gets to go see The Academy Awards live and in person every year. Since I have been watching them from afar all my life, this makes me positively chartreuse with envy.

For my dear friend, though, the thrill wore off a few years ago. So she and her siblings, bored from their oh-so-many star sightings, decided to raise the stakes. They invented a game they call “Brush with Fame.” The goal is to see who, by the end of the night, can come the closest to an honest-to-goodness world-renowned celebrity — possibly even brushing against or bumping into them — without that star noticing. I believe there are bonus points if the famous person in question is also one of the night’s winners. The sibling pack are the arbiters of which star shines the brightest, and the winner gets family bragging rights for the year. Last year my friend, the baby of the group, beat out her siblings by getting close enough to ‘bump’ into Rob Pattinson, the world’s most famous sparkly vampire.

Upon discovering this game, I did what any obsessive film geek would do: I began imagining who I would try to ‘bump’ into. But as a diehard perfumista, I was equally enamored by a concurrent mystery: if I did get that close, close enough to touch them, what would they smell like?

If I were in my friend’s shoes, here’s who I’d be aiming for this Sunday and what I’d hope to smell as I was passing by…

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