You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?

— Burt Reynolds to thengal pal Sally Field, when she went on to win the Oscar for “Norma Rae”

Oscars alone because her boyfriend Burt Reynolds was jealous. “You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?” he sneered. A tearful Field told her friends, the comedian David Steinberg and his then-wife Judy, about Reynolds. “Well, for God’s sakes, we’ll take you,” Steinberg said. They picked her up in a limousine well stocked with champagne. “They made it just wonderful fun,” she said.

CONTROVERSY swirled around Jane Fonda, nominated in 1972 for her performance as a prostitute in “Klute.” The Vietnam War was raging and Fonda took part in many protests denouncing the United States. The Hollywood establishment, much of it conservative and patriotic, despised her. She was pretty sure she’d win — her performance remains as fresh as ever — but she wasn’t sure what she should say to a potentially hostile crowd. She asked her father, Henry Fonda, for advice. He told her: “Just say, ‘There’s a lot to be said tonight, but this isn’t the time.’ ”

That’s what she did, and nobody booed. But she left the stage in tears. She’d just won an Oscar, but her father, a Hollywood legend, never had. “It just seemed wrong,” she said.

(Henry Fonda won the Oscar in 1982 for his performance in “On Golden Pond.” He was too ill to attend the ceremony, so Jane accepted the award for him. “Dad, me and all the grandchildren are coming over with it right away,” she said. He died five months later.)

Karger wraps up his chapters by asking the Oscar winners where they keep the statue. Most are displayed in living rooms or offices. Mel Brooks gave his (Best Original Screenplay, “The Producers,” 1969) to his mother so she could put it on the TV set in her Florida condo and impress her friends.

But Clint Eastwood, who has three, puts it all into perspective: “They’re all on a shelf in the den along with some other stuff you get along the way, over the years.”