A Gobful of Oscar
of spit with the director of There Will be Blood
I have hit on the formula for an Oscar winning performance.
It is spit.
The more the saliva comes spurting forth from an actor’s mouth, the more likely he or she is to bag that nekkid little gold doorstopper.
Or better, a spit, snot sweat and tear combo. Get them all going and the award’s as good as won.
The latest case for this is Daniel Day Lewis in “There will be blood”. He is awash with the stuff and it is brilliant. Great fountains of sputum fly into the atmosphere in his many scenery eating moments. Some of it even hangs from his moustache and slowly waves back and forth as he rants. Beautiful.
And that, my friends, is why he is going to win that Oscar, mark my words. Just saw “There will be Blood” last night and my Spider-sense is tingling.
Still, I’m not one to make false and unsubstantiated claims. So, to further back up my point I am going to back up the saliva theory with some actual historical and statistical evidence.
Take the case of Justin Henry. He was the youngest ever Oscar nominee for Kramer Vs Kramer.
He cries a lot in the film, particularly when he falls off that climbing frame making Dustin Hoffman realise how much he loves the little tyke, even though he’s been cramping his style somewhat with the ladies since Mum left.
Justin’s all about the blood, tears, snot and spit in that scene. He checks all the bodily emission boxes. He didn’t win the gong though, but he might have if he had actually shat himself. There’s probably not a day goes past when he ruminates on that.
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; plenty of spit in that. Dribbling post lobotomy spit; best you can get. Nicholson walks away with gong and the reassurance that he need never try hard ever again.
Anthony Hopkins wins Best actor Award for only 17 minutes of screen time in “The Silence of the Lambs”. Reason? That sucky spitty saliva thing he does through his teeth at the mention of fava beans and a nice Chianti. Statuette in the bag. Inventive use of the sputum duly rewarded.
Dustin tries to pick a bogie off Meryl’s cheek after a heavy scene
Meryl Streep is the most nominated actress in the history of the Academy Awards, even for crappy films that’s she’s in (Devil Wears Prada? You’re kidding me!).
The simple reason is that Streep is the Headmistress of the School of Mucus. She can cry buckets of tears at will, but also has the acting chops to emit snot from her nose (where else?) as she does so. Even when speaking in a foreign accent!
Again, see Kramer Vs Kramer for evidence of the tears/snot/spit combo. Quite incredible.
Dribbling To Evoke Learning Difficulties/Disability/Madness Category
We couldn’t let this study* end without mentioning the classic Dribbling To Evoke Learning difficulties/Disability/Madness Category where sputum is a must.
John Mills in Ryan’s Daughter, anyone? The man is positively gliding along like a slug on a river of his own saliva!
And then there’s Daniel Day Lewis picking up his first ever Oscar for “My Left Foot”. Apparently he was so parched at the end of each scene from loss of saliva they had to stick a drip in him! (It had to be a 1950s style drip, you know, to keep in with the character and mood of the film. He’s a method actor donchaknow?)
“But what about little old Tommy Cruise?” I hear you cry, “He’s dribbled a plenty and he’s got nothing!”
Yes it’s true, Tom’s chances of the elusive mooning bling figurine looked certain when he scored the double whammy of playing a wheelchair bound and angry, spitting war veteran in “Born on the Fourth of July”. Hell, there’s even a scene where he poops himself! So why did he not get the Oscar?
Simple: because he’s rubbish.
* Surely a doctorate winning paper on this theory is only a few thousand words away…
The Tearoom Six
Kids are not to be trusted. Never forget that.
The reason I say this is because despite being quite a good girl at school, give me any job which included an element of trust and I would simply blow it. Especially given the presence of a buddy whipping me up.
Some key phrases seem to have had an almost chemical effect on me.
They were:
“Awww, go onnnn…”,
“C’mon Misssy, it’ll be a laugh”
And my all time button pusher,
“I dare ya”
In Primary Seven when I was 11 years old, each week a pair of girls would be on coffee duty for the teachers. Aside from flouting the laws governing equal opportunities in a cavalier fashion, (like, can boys not make a cup of tea?) it was a chance to get away from maths or somesuch bollocks 15 minutes early.
The deal was that two 11 year old pupils would make teas and coffees to order for all the school’s teachers, in the combination staff room/headmistress’s office. It was a quite a small school, so we’re really only talking about nine coffees… tops.
I could burble on about the teachers taking complete advantage of our child labour but really the week you were on “tea and coffee duty” was, in truth, a bloody great week.
At first, the casual vandalism was slight and unimaginative. One of us would maybe spit in the kettle or wipe a bogey in the jacket pocket of a less popular teacher, but pretty soon the whole thing got out of hand. Ahh, the addictive power of hysterical, wet-your-pants laughter.
Now, we never nicked anything, I want to make that much clear. Destruction and slow burning pranks were more our bag. Even when you were not on tea duty, you would wait to hear stories at playtime of the offences committed by your tea-making compatriots. We got away with it for months.
There was one particular teacher we didn’t like, Miss Mathers. Her nickname was “Muggy”, quite why I don’t know, but it suited her. She looked like a hippy with lank henna’d long hair, no bra, (complete with pendulous boobs like a Masai woman) a muslin collar-less shirt and floaty skirt. This outward appearance would lull you into a false sense of security. Outside she was a clean living version Janis Joplin; inside she was a dragon. She kept order in her class by simply screaming in the faces of kids to an extent that their hair would be blown back like in a cartoon.
Still she had never done anything to me, so why did I feel the need to fill her rubber mac pockets up with washing up liquid, when I eventually decided that spitting in them wasn’t going to be enough for me?
Bizarrely (OK predictably) , this was the prank that got us all caught and banned from the “privilege” of doing the teas. Which was sad really, because we’d had a good run.
As the six Primary 7 girls stood before the Headmistress, each not owning up nor ratting on one another (just like in Prisoner Cell Block H, we weren’t no “Laa-aagers”) we felt strangely cheated as the washing up liquid was one of the tamer things we did.
I almost felt like saying, “But we did much worse than that! C’mon! What about the pinhole in the student teacher’s condom that was in his jacket pocket? What about the prank phone calls from the Headmistresses desk? What about dead mouse smuggled in from home that we’ve put in the staff toilet cistern that you’ll only find out about in six months when you finally work out what that stench is??”
Never trust kids. Especially girls.
