Bruce Davis, Executive Director of the Academy which hands out the coveted Oscar statuettes each year will be attending the star-crammed mega event on the night of January 16, 1999 at the Andheri Sports Complex. Accompanying Davis will be Hollywood's high priest of special effects. Richard Edlund, a governor in the academy and four-time Oscar winner for special effects in megamovies like the Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark will watch Bollywood's biggies like Ghulam, Satya, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Pyaar to Hona Hi Tha, among others, slugging it out for numero uno position in a week from now.

Davis who joined the academy staff in 1981 following a college teaching career became the seventh director of the academy eight years later. He has been instrumental inconverting the Beverly Hills Waterworks into the Centre for Motion Picture Study. He also created the Academy's Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowships and is establishing a new theatre for the presentation of the Academy Awards in Hollywood in 2001.

Edlund has been nominated for an Oscar eleven times. In the last two decades, Edlund has waved his magic wand to add stupendous visual and sound FX to blockbusters like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Simply the most pathbreaking special effects extravaganzas in the history of cinema.

He followed it up with the chilling Poltergeist, the sequel to Arthur C Clarke's sci fi epic 2010 which at least equalled if not surpassed the effects of the original 2001.

In 1988, when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in a Los Angeles highrise beginning the trend of `closetted action thrillers' in the original Die Hard, Edlund was there to blow up the building, crash helicopters and provide theother thrills and spills.

And in 1997 when the action shifted onto a jumbo jet, the American President's, no less, in Air Force One, Edlund was the man for the job. He erected one of the largest green screens in moviedom on the Sony studios for all the action involving the cast including crashing the digitally recreated 747.Six years ago in the third instalment of the creepy Alien, Edlund brought audiences to the edge of their seats in director David Fincher' frantic steady-cam chiller about a marauding maneater. So he was quite ready handling the effects for another marauding alien in Species. He also provided effects for the caped crusader sequel Batman Returns and Sylvester Stallone's knock-em-up actioner Cliffhanger. In yet another special effects breakthrough, he helped four Michael Keatons seamlessly interact with each other in the cloning comedy Multiplicity.

Besides bagging four Oscars, two British Academy Awards Edlund also serves as co-chairman ofthe academy's scientific and technical awards committee, which recognises breakthroughs in film technology. He is a past member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and of the American Society of Cinematographers.