On the third day of the Music by Prudence Oscar speech fallout, Elinor Burkett, a.k.a. the "Kanye of the Oscars," spoke to Joy Behar. Unlike the previous night's humiliating CNN segment, in which Larry King pulled a one-two-re-interrupt-punch on Prudence director Roger Ross Williams, Burkett immediately asserted good will among viewers and host by heartily agreeing that "yes, the Oscars were so dull that I spent most of the ceremony chain-smoking outside." Charmed, Behar leaned in as her Academy Award-winning doppleganger lurched ahead with a tale of Sunday's events which would pit the raspy documentary producer as the first victim of acceptance speech "bigfooting" in the Academy's history.
ELINOR: I had two choices, right? Either I could let [Williams] blather on for 45 seconds, because that was our max -- this year only one person could speak -- or I could interrupt so I get to talk. And everybody thinks that I was bad for interrupting him. So they don't think he was bad for, like, bigfooting me to prevent me from speaking at all?
JOY: Bigfooting you?
ELINOR: Yeah, yeah. Well that's what he did. You saw how he ran up -- and maybe like I'm just a middle-aged crazy person, it could be -- but I think that you get up, then you wait for me to get up, we go up together graciously and you don't start talking at least while I'm halfway down at the other end of the Kodak Theater.
[Forget the fact that Joy did not follow up with the question, "So if only one person was allowed onstage, why hadn't you figured out who would accept the trophy beforehand?"]
JOY: Uh huh.
ELINOR: I mean, that was pretty bigfooty.
JOY: When they announced the winner, what went through your mind? I mean you were sitting there with his mother, right? So what happened in your head?
ELINOR: That if I don't get to that stage in three seconds, he's not going to thank the band, he's only going to talk about himself. Because that's what he did.
But Elinor returned to point long enough to explain that because Songs by Prudence was not a big film, "the speech needs to be about the subjects of the film. Not about, 'I am so happy. I, I, I -- the speech needed to be about the band."
See, all of you Burkett-haters? The estranged producer was actually saving you from a self-serving speech that no one cared about by replacing it with a babbling speech that you cared about slightly more. Burkett = Documentary Hero. Williams = "Bigfooty."
And as for those Kanye comparisons, Burkett explained that she was in Zimbabwe during the VMAs so she wasn't sure why people were comparing her to the rapper, especially since, well "Did Kanye win the Oscar?" Touché, Elinor.