By now you will have all seen the video of Mariah Carey cackling and slurring and wailing like a goon at an awards show.

And rightly so. It’s a work of epic, unimpeachable brilliance. Sure, Mariah Carey may have embarrassed herself onstage before, but this is almost certainly the first time she’s done it without the involvement of Westlife. However, every party must come to an end – even brilliant parties that mostly involve staring blankly into space for vast periods of time and/or spontaneous unprovoked applause for nobody in particular – and the autopsy must take place.

So why was Mariah Carey so berserk the other night? The answer appears to be ‘champagne’. We know, we didn’t see it coming, either.

Tell you what, though – this reinvention of Mariah Carey is going excellently, isn’t it? At first we thought that she simply wanted to be taken seriously as a serious actor by appearing in a couple of low-budget films without any make-up on, but it would seem that Mariah’s aspirations go much deeper than that. It seems that Mariah Carey doesn’t just want to be any serious actor – she wants to be Oliver Reed.

Admittedly that’s based on a single five-minute video of Mariah Carey looking slightly tipsy at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards on Sunday instead of, say, decades of well-publicised habitual alcoholism, but that hardly counts. Because it’s now official – contrary to rumours we’ve literally just made up, Mariah Carey’s bizarre acceptance speech on Tuesday night wasn’t the result of dental anaesthetic or a head injury stemming from a nasty fall from her pet unicorn. It was because she had been drinking moderate amounts of champagne.

No, really, it’s true. Mariah Carey admitted it and everything. BBC News quotes:

“We’d been there celebrating the whole time, having little splashes of champagne. I hadn’t eaten… Technically it’s kind like a party atmosphere – they trick you, you know what I mean? If people don’t understand me and think that I’m just this girl who stands by a microphone and sings Hero, then they’re definitely not going to get me… We had splashes of champagne.”

Mariah Carey makes a good point – people shouldn’t think that she’s just a girl who stands by a microphone and sings Hero. She’s quite obviously also the girl who stands by a microphone and grabs men by the back of the neck to steady herself while embarking on fruitless, meandering anecdotes about her new film that are interspersed with giggling, endless vacant pauses and occasional outbreaks of applause for things that only she can hear inside her own head.

So congratulations Mariah Carey, and may your run of awards continue all the way to the Oscars. Hopefully by then you’ll be so drunk that you’ll vomit down your dress and start crying.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter