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Oscars Pressroom Wrap-up: What the Winners Said Backstage
The charming Jean Dujardin, Best Actor winner at the Oscars, clowns around backstage. (Photo: Richard Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.)
Long after the show was over, most of the Academy Awards’ major category winners (except Best Supporting Oscar Winner Christopher Plummer) slowly made their way to the Oscar pressroom. Here are some of our favorite quotes and anecdotes from the backstage interviews tonight:
Christopher Plummer was funny and a little ornery. When a reporter asked about what he meant when he spoke to his wife during his acceptance speech, he said, “What do you think it means? I thought it was abundantly clear. Of course, I’m a naughty boy. I’ve been bad all my life, and she always puts me in line...‘She rescues me every day of my life.’ What could be clearer?”
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What was Octavia Spencer was in a hurry to do after the press questions? "Tonight, I am going to find my castmates and have a quarter of a glass of champagne."
When a reporter asked a question about how she felt about the racial makeup of the Academy—mostly older, white men—and how they could diversify? (It was a bit of a buzzkill question for her.) She answered, “I can’t tell the Academy what to do....they just gave me an Oscar!” and cracked up the pressroom. She later apologized to the reporter for cutting her off. “I didn’t want to get on that bus.”
She also told the room that she'd like to play roles both in front of and behind the scenes. “I want to be a producer...”
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Meryl Streep was a favorite with the reporters for her self-deprecating humor: “I understand Streep fatigue...I’m happy that I didn’t take anything for granted.”
When asked how it felt winning tonight, she said, “They call your name and you go into a white light...and I felt like a kid again...I was a kid when I won 30 years ago...two of the [other] nominees weren’t even conceived.”
On what it was like seeing herself in makeup as Margaret Thatcher: “I saw my dad...maybe my dad looked like Margaret Thatcher.”
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A reporter asked The Descendents writers Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash about their “Jolie-ing...“ on stage. One of them, we can't remember who, said, "We have exactly the same legs..”
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Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist, said he wished he could have thanked Billy Wilder 1,000 times. Billy Wilder is the “soul of Hollywood.”
He also said that he wants to remake the Montgomery Clift movie The Search (1948), with his wife Bérénice Bejo.
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And finally, the dreamy and charming Jean Dujardin was the last to enter the interview room. Most of his Q&A period was in French, and we didn't understand half of it, but we didn't care. When a reporter asked how he would transition to talkies in America (which got a laugh out of the press corps), he said, “I’m not an American actor, I am a French actor.”
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Then he says something in French, and the translator says, “If he could make another silent movie in America, he would like to.”
He gave us quite a few laughs in the pressroom, which was a great way to end a long, long night.
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