I spent this year's Oscars ceremony playing a drinking game, solo, in a busy office. This is my story
• The rules: what Stuart had to drink and eat, and when
• The evidence: what Stuart looked like, through the night
It is 4am on Monday morning. I am in The Guardian offices, surrounded by dozens of busy people. As Barbara Streisand croons Memories on the office TV, I am eating handfuls of cold lentils from a tin and making a noise like a cat sicking up a shoelace. I'm mortified. All I want to do is crawl inside a binbag, fill it with rocks and throw myself into the canal.
This, it turns out, is what if happens if you play drinking games on Oscar night.
I've always enjoyed the Oscars in the same way that all other sensible people enjoy the Oscars: by sleeping soundly through them, waking up, reading who won online and then watching a desolate-looking showbiz correspondent fail to secure any meaningful afterparty interviews on Daybreak. Sitting through a full Oscars ceremony on purpose seemed like a thankless endurance test; like running a marathon or reading a celebrity autobiography from cover to cover. It's just not something that you'd willingly do.
However, this year the paper roped me into creating and playing a special Oscar night drinking game. To be honest, it sounded fun. Especially because I could write the rules myself, with my own tolerances and limitations in mind. But looking back, there's a chance that my first draft was possibly a smidge too conservative. I'd latched onto the idea that Abraham Lincoln was tee-total, for instance, so I decided to commemorate any mention of Daniel Day Lewis with a glass of milk. I think I put a nice cup of tea on the list, too. And a nap. Everyone likes naps.
But the list grew as it passed up the chain of command, both in length and severity. By the time it was published, it required me to strip, kiss people, chop off my hair and basically down a bottle of neat spirits every time I heard anyone use an adverb. I was terrified. I was terrified of catching the eye of anyone directly responsible for commissioning me. I was terrified that someone important would Google me and see a photo of me making a Red Bull and Ovaltine cocktail in a tin can at three o'clock in the morning. Most of all, and I maintain that my priorities were correct, I was scared of involuntarily weeing myself all over the place.
But the beauty of the Oscars is that they incite boredom. Sitting through the red carpet coverage – which mainly consisted of the world's smallest woman cornering a procession of actors, screaming "Your work is a gift!" into their midriffs and waiting for their bewildered reactions – felt like an eternity spent being attacked by houseflies. By the time it finished, I was ready to get fully, steamingly, heroically drunk.
Which was a good thing, because the new, revised drinking game was ridiculously intense. Channing Tatum did a song and dance number early on, so I had to eat a load of carrot cake. There was a Lincoln joke, so I had to down a measure of port. Argo was whisky. Anna Karenina was vodka. There was cava. There was a bottle of pre-mixed Pina Colada. Whenever anybody thanked anyone, I had to eat a mouthful of jam tarts and Haribo. The mixture of solids and fluids in my stomach was so volatile that at one point I burped and three other writers leapt out of the way, the same as they would if faced with an unexploded second world war bomb.
It could have been worse, though. Thanks to Life of Pi's unexpected run of victories, I had to do nothing more than sip beer for some of the ceremony. Had Argo won those categories, I would have emptied my guts across the newsroom floor more than once.
I think I got away with it, though. "You don't look too bad," someone said as I left the office at 5.30am. "No, I don't," I thought, proudly. Then I stole a block of cheese from someone's desk, got lost, spent 20 minutes staggering around the corridors looking for an exit and then briefly fell asleep on a toilet. Like the Oscars, I'm all class.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/feb/25/oscars-2013-drinking-game
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