In my ever-continuing pursuit to give you the best Oscar coverage on the interwebs, I have persuaded several actors nominated for Academy Awards to take the time to tell you why they deserve the Oscar. Here now is Daniel Day-Lewis, nominated for Best Actor for his riveting performance as oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood…

Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy… I’ve traveled through over half the awards season to be here tonight. I couldn’t get away sooner because my SAG statue was coming in at TNT and I had to see about it. That award is now flowing in the box office returns at two million per weekend and it’s paying me a residual rate of twenty cents on the first dollar. I have three other Oscar nominations and I have twenty-four other critically-acclaimed performances at the Academy. So, ladies and gentlemen voters… if I say I’m an actor you will agree.

You have a great chance here, but bear in mind, you can lose it all if you give the award to George Clooney again. Out of all men that beg for a chance to win Best Actor, maybe one in five will be actors; the rest will be speculators - men trying to get between you and the box office - to get some of the money that ought by rights of sitting through their dreck, come to you. Even if you find one that has talent, like Viggo Mortensen, and means to entertain, he’ll maybe know nothing about real performing and he’ll have to hire out the stunt work and dialect coaching on contract, and then you’re depending on a freelancer that’s trying to teach Johnny Depp to sound British so he can get another contract just as quick as he can to teach Meryl Streep how to speak like an Afghani. That is the way this works.

I do my own acting and the directors that work for me work for me and they are directors I know. I make it my business to be there and see to their work, even if it is Magnolia. I don’t lose my concentration on the set and spend months making it better in the editing room; I don’t botch the rehearsal process and let bad actors leave waste in the film can and ruin the whole picture.

I’m a performer - I run a performing business. This is my first Oscar and my favorite award statue, Best Actor for My Left Foot:

/indicates Best Actor Oscar for My Left Foot

I’m fixed like no other actor in this field and that’s because my Golden Globe Award has just come in. I have a string of publicists all ready to work. I can send an agent into a lunch meeting and have them get me a Scorsese movie lined up in a week. I have studio head connections so I can get the free rein to act crazy on the set; such things go by friendship in an industry like this. And this is why I can guarantee to start acting more and put up the four-star reviews to back my word.

I assure you voters, whatever the other actors in this category promise to do, when it comes to the Oscar Night showdown, they won’t be there…

Bangarang!