Jessica Who?

I've just been working with a guy who has been kissed by Sandra Bullock.

She did so as she was giving him his Oscar.

He was on Team Lord of the Rings. The poor sod happened to be trapped in a car with me for about five hours and the only way he was going to avoid giving me an Oscars blow-by-blow account was if he were willing hurl himself from a moving vehicle.

(Just to put this into perspective, people-who-don't-live-in-New-Zealand, when LOTR was being made you could divide people in the country into three categories, people who worked on LOTR, people who knew someone who worked on LOTR and tourists.)

Anyway, his stories were sensational and he made a potentially run of the mill schlep through the countryside highly entertaining.

His first Oscar was only just beginning to gather dust when the old greedy guts was nominated for another for King Kong. Him, and the other guys who were nominated were so sure that it would go to Walk the Line that they hadn't even prepared a speech.

Just as an aside, speeches are strictly allowed to be no longer than forty-five seconds. You even receive instructions in which you are told to not thank your family. There are three ways to they get you to wind up your speech, bring the music up, turn the lights down and if you're still banging on after that, they make the microphone retract back down into the floor, which I think is very Batman of them.

Anyway, he was proud of the fact that all four of them managed to say something before they got the moving-right-along-folks music.

He said that their award was presented by Eric Bana and an incredibly beautiful woman. When they were walking off the stage he whispered to one of the other guys, 'What's her name?'

'Jessica.'

'Jessica who?'

'Alba.'

I am reasonably confident to say that he must be the only guy in New Zealand who has two Oscars, been kissed by Jessica Alba and Sandra Bullock and nearly kissed by Halle Berry - except they didn't win that year.