It's Oscar time - lampoon of Oscar Awards

Interview, March, 1994

By now you may know the ground rules of the Two-Minute Oscars as well as we do: they celebrate the great but fleeting performances, those too short to be enshrined anywhere but here and in the memories of true movie lovers. Favorites of your own? We'd love to hear them.

1 QUENTIN CRISP, whose delicately amorous Elizabeth I in Orlando may have substantively changed our vision of the English monarchy, possibly for the better.

2 SHAREEN MITCHELL as the harried exotic dancer of American Heart, whose reaction to the sight of her young son at her peekarama window remains a high point in movie motherhood.

3 PETER VAUGHAN as the paradigm of menservants, whose death during a crucial banquet so inconveniences his impeccable butler son (Anthony Hopkins) in The Remains of the Day.

4 ELINA LOWENSOHN as the forthright concentration-camp prisoner whose objections to the Nazis' building methods get her shot on the spot, as much for her expertise as her temerity, in Schindler's List.

5 IRENE NG as the canny and beautiful child bride who uses her wits to rid herself of her spoiled, pudgy boy-husband and his whole caviling family in one of The Joy Luck Club's Chinese sequences.

6 ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL as the preppie whose perfect-pitch coaching in the ways of the rich and indolent gives Will Smith unquestioned entree to their world in Six Degrees of Separation.

7 GENEVIEVE LEMON as the dithering, lace-capped Nessie, who nurses an utterly unrequited crush on Harvey Keitel in The Piano. (In truth, Lemon's role as Nessie makes her a rather substantial Two-Minute contender, but her work in Sweetie won my heart forever.)

8 GINA McKEE as the arresting, neurasthenic cafe waitress who becomes the last of David Thewlis's stations of the cross during Naked's dark journey of the soul.

9 ADRIEN BRODY as Lester, the loathsome, bullying bellboy in King of the Hill.

10 And finally, the first Two-Minute pair: from The Age of Innocence, MICHAEL GOUGH and, in her last performance, ALEXIS SMITH as the van der Luydens, implacable arbiters of New York society, who wield their power with steely and consummate graciousness.