The best actors are the losers at the Oscars

AT the Oscars Mark Rylance gave an acceptance speech where he spoke for longer than he did in Bridge of Spies and Wolf Hall put together, while Leonardo DiCaprio urged action on climate change, rather sweetly thanked Broxburn’s Michael Caton-Jones for giving him his first job, but forgot the bear.

So now DiCaprio can finally go play a Bond villain, while agents, accountants and mothers broke their 87-year stranglehold over the Oscars, with the introduction of a scroll card running the laundry list of people that winners wanted to thank.

Sandra Bullock remains my favourite winner for thanking her mother ‘for not letting me ride in cars with boys until I was 18. Because she was right. I would have done what she said I was gonna do’.

However, the best acting at an awards show comes from a silent majority; the four out of five who leave empty-handed, fighting deflation and defeat.

THERE'S a chilly story about Judy Garland when she was nominated for A Star Is Born. The night before the Oscars she went into labour and gave birth to her third child, but everyone was so sure she would win that the Academy set up TV cameras around her bed so that she could accept her award live from the hospital.

For the duration of the show, she was bathed in a Klieg light of acclaim, until Grace Kelly unexpectedly won Best Actress for The Country Girl instead.

Suddenly, brutally, the crew disbanded and the TV lights were switched off, so that Garland was literally plunged into darkness.

It’s a bitter pill to take in front of billions of people, especially since nowadays any big awards show zooms in on the losers when the winner is announced so that we can see their reaction as they process the news.

Crushing t heir acceptance speeches in their pockets, they are forced to paste on expressions that range from tight, polite enjoyment (‘Ah well, I look forward to seeing your work after I have stopped stabbing this small voodoo model of you’) to the weirdly ecstatic (‘I’m actually crying more than if I had won myself’).

A few years ago, my talented friend Sergio Casci was nominated for a Bafta for one of his screenplays, so off to London, after practising his graceful loser face, just in case his name wasn’t called.

Thanks to his prescience, friends and family saw Sergio applauding benignly from his seat when another name was read out. Alas his wife, who was also at the event, had not been briefed.

And unfortunately the shot was wide enough to include her, face screwed up in disgust beside him, obviously mouthing a word that roughly means darn it, but rhymes with ‘bad luck’.

This is where goodie bags come in; a consolation prize that works like those party bags kids collect at the end of a birthday party, so they don’t f eel bad about l osing pass-the-parcel.

even for lesser mortals like me, there is a humble version of the goodie bag. At the end of a newspaper ceremony some years ago, I was given a bag, which I eagerly ripped open in the cab.

It contained a pen, some aftershave and a jar of Barry Norman’s pickled onions. And you know what? I wasn’t disappointed. Like his films, Barry knows his onions.