Oscar Buzz: Students compete to be The Red Carpet Interviewer at The Oscars

If you're a regular follower of this blog, you remember the three college student groups who were selected as finalists in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMAPAS) and MTV-U competition to be an interviewers on the Red Carpet on Oscar Sunday for the Academy Awards.

Today, I had the pleasure of meeting and video-interviewing the three groups of six students as they happened to be on the Red Carpet with AMPAS officials. They are every bit as nice and charming in person as they come across on their videos and in my video.

Original videos here: MTV-U contest.

To recap, Rachel Berry (anchor) and Christian Hartnett (videographer) represent Chapman University in Orange, CA; Terry Stackhouse (anchor) and Zach Cusson (videographer) are from Emerson College, in Boston; Brandon McCaskill (anchor) and Kiarra Hart (videographer) are from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. The front runners in the competition are the Chapman U students who got 52 percent of the online vote at the time of my first blog post. But that written, there was only about two percent separating the three teams.

As you can see in the video, they're all very fun and good natured people who know that they represent AMPAS as much as they represent their colleges. I asked all of them what they would say to Tom Cruise and got some interesting responses as the video shows.

I like all of the students both professionally and personally, but if I had to pick one anchor, Rachel Berry just has that "Mary Hart" star quality, and even Brandon McCaskill liked her work and came to her defense to express his opinion when I teased her about coming up with a corny video (the the first blog post). Rachel Berry was well put together in what looked to be a black Donna Karan dress (I'll double check that one.) All of the videographers were quite talented and their styles were so different it's hard to pick a "best one".

The final announcement of the winner will be tomorrow morning at 10 AM on The Red Carpet at Kodak Theater. I'll be there to talk to everyone and will post more videos.

Meanwhile, good luck to all of the folks! See you Saturday!

And follow my Twitter tweets from LA at Zennie62.com