People tend to think that winning an Oscar is evidence that an actor is, in the words of Jon Lovitz, a Master Thespian, i.e., an immense talent who appears only in serious cinema that stretches the minds of all who see it, superior to all those journeyman types who eke out a living doing mere movies. Um, no. The truth is that most Oscar winners get lucky. That’s not to say that they’re not talented — although you can always quibble about some — but rather that they had the good sense or the good fortune to choose the right project at the right time. Acting, like careers in every other industry you can think of, depends as much on factors that the individual cannot control as those he or she can, and most of the time, achieving the pinnacle of an Oscar win is followed by an inevitable decline into “paying the mortgage” roles.

All of which is a rather long and pretentious way of introducing the following amusing video, ganked from AMC-TV‘s SciFi Scanner blog:

For the record, I don’t remember Ray Milland as the star of The Thing with Two Heads. No, in my mind, he will forever be the unscrupulous Sire Uri from the original Battlestar Galactica. He appeared only in the three-hour pilot film and was last seen cravenly running for his life from the attacking Cylon ground forces on Carillon (I like to think he took a laser blast in his smug, puffy face and the Ovions ate what was left over), but he’s always stood out in my mind as an embodiment of the petty evil that so often stems from personal wealth and an overblown sense of entitlement.