Transcript from Oscar Talk with William Joyce

William Joyce: What's it like for a regular person to win an Oscar? Hm. (Music up and under) I highly recommend it. It's very fun. Look, I've loved movies since I was a kid. And I've watched the Oscars since I was a little kid and always found it fascinating as do my partners at work. And I guess it's just one of those iconographic things. I mean. Nobody knows what a Nobel Prize looks like but they know what an Oscar looks like, ok. And so… we got nominated and it was our fervent hope, you know, that we would do something to put us on the map and that if we could get nominated that would be amazing. But, you know, we're in Shreveport, Louisiana. I mean that's not Hollywood, and it's not Prague, and it's not Paris, and it's not Berlin, and it's not London and it's not New York, and it's not Emeryville, California. And so it just seemed like a pipe dream. It seemed almost feckless of us to even think about it, but we did. And so to have gotten through the hoops to just be nominated was amazing. There are so many things that could go wrong and they didn't. So we're nominated and that's just like we're going to the Big Show. When they announced our names I felt like every atom in my body separated and I became just a gas. And that I didn't quite come back together as a solid, you know, for a day or so. And my son was with me and we all went to the Vanity Fair party afterwards. We couldn't cross the street; we couldn't get across Sunset Boulevard, you know, because it's a boulevard and it's Sunset and there's a lot of cars and it's Oscar night. And so traffic was going by and, I was like hey let me just try like a Charlton Heston thing and I held the Oscar out, out from the curb, and sure enough, man, all of the cars stopped. And people started getting out and taking pictures and we got to cross the street. These things have powers. I keep it most of the time by the bedside table. I wake up in the middle of the night and just like turn over and look at it and go (sighs), "Yeah. All's right with the world for now…" It was fun. Totally fun. It was incredibly generous. It was Hollywood's way and what I never really realized of all the glamour and pomp of the show, the real undercurrent, the thing that you actually experience when you're there, is that the whole thing is set up to basically say, "nice job. We really think you guys did a nice job." Here's a pat on the back. And all of it was gracious and, and in a strange way really moving. And everyone we spoke to after we won whether it be Steven Spielberg or Meryl Streep or Tom Cruise were so congenial and charming and nice and they seemed genuinely happy for us. And it might've been the fact that we were jumping up and down and screaming like little kids constantly but it was a good thing. Music: Excerpt of "As Colorful As Ever" by Broke for Free from their album, Layers. Excerpt of "When You're All Dressed Up" by Billy Murray from the Antique Music Phonograph Program (03/23/10). Both songs used courtesy of Creative Commons and found on WFMU's Free Music Archive. freemusicarchive.org