But what’s also fact is it’s not universally loved. The sad truth is that some saps can’t take pleasure from a recording of a prick being a prick to a prick. And, inevitably, most of those people are famous.

So far, Whoopi Goldberg and Terry Crews have stood up for Christian Bale, building hopes that there’ll soon be an all-star charity concert to raise awareness of the rights of unbearably dickish actors with indeterminate accents so. Fingers crossed it’s called AH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-Aid.

Look, we know it might cause unimaginable harm to his career as an actor, but we never want this Christian Bale rant stuff to end. Really, we don’t.

It’s so perfect that we want it to follow him everywhere for the rest of his life. We want Batman 3 to be about Christian Bale being driven into geographically nonspecific madness when an Alfred The Butler keeps trashing his scene and walking about ah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah like this even though he’s a nice guy.

When Christian Bale dies, we want his Oscars ‘In Memorium’ photo to be accompanied by the sound of him shrieking “DO NOT SHUT ME UP! NO! NO!” In short, we are in love with Christian Bale’s Terminator rant and we want to marry it.

But that’s going to be an uphill struggle, not only because getting married to a recording of Christian Bale’s abusive voice is both unlawful and probably a sign of a deep psychiatric disorder, but also because several people are doing their best to brush Christian Bale’s obviously dickish behaviour under the carpet. Yesterday a Terminator Salvation assistant director called Christian Bale’s rant a ‘non-event’, and now other celebrities are leaping on the bandwagon as well.

First came Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi can totally relate to Christian Bale’s predicament, partly because of the time she got so angry on the set of Star Trek that she ended up biting Worf on the forehead, and secondly because her day-job involves sitting on a table with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a job which would leave anyone teetering on the edge of a violent meltdown. On The View, Whoopi said:

“We don’t know if this (incident happened) at the end of the day, we don’t know how many hours (he had) been working. It’s tough. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I too have gone off on people, because if you’re a professional, you know what you’re not supposed to do.”

And then Terry Crews, who is apparently an actor, decided to step in for Christian Bale as well, saying:

“I’d get mad too if I was the number one star in the world and people started to mess with me. He is a class act. He is one of the greatest actors ever. You can catch anyone on a bad day.”

Where we go from here is anybody’s guess. Although it looks like the movie world is already starting to rally around Christian Bale, there are also murmurs that his career could be badly affected by his outburst.

All we do know is that Christian Bale and Shane Hurlbut – the man on the receiving end of his tantrum – are through, professionally. Which is a real shame – as well as Terminator Salvation, Bale and Hurlbut had previously worked together on the Samuel L Jackson Shaft movie, meaning that Hurlbut’s career in the spectacularly badly thought-out remake/sequel business is all but over.

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Up until now Whoopi hadn't been doing so well, only talking about winning an Oscar on the day after the Oscars. But that was before Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

You see, Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze starred together in Ghost, the movie that Whoopi Goldberg won her Oscar for. And yesterday on The View, Whoopi paid tribute to Patrick Swayze by claiming that she wouldn't have won her Oscar if it wasn't for him. Which we're sure will brighten Patrick's day immeasurably, unless he happens to have something more important on his mind at the moment.

Patrick Swayze is in an unthinkably rough situation at the moment. It's one thing to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – one of the most vicious, life-destroying cancers there is – and to apparently be given just five weeks to live, but quite another for the media to discovery it and tell everyone.

What's happened – especially now that Patrick Swayze's cancer has been confirmed – is that Patrick Swayze is in the unique position of being able to read all his obituaries before he's even died. Newspapers are running retrospectives on his work and other celebrities are giving teary-eyed confessional tributes to him, and Patrick Swayze's still around to hear them all.

Never mind that nobody's going to write Patrick Swayze's actual obituary once he finally dies without repeating themselves, it's just a little bit, well, weird. But that hasn't stopped Whoopi Goldberg from paying tribute to Patrick Swayze on The View.

Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar in 1990 – did she mention that before? Has Whoopi Goldberg ever happened to mention that she won an Oscar? Well she did, she won an Oscar even though everybody at the Oscars has obviously forgotten all about it – for Ghost. Ghost was, of course, a Patrick Swayze film, and Whoopi Goldberg maintains that she wouldn't have won her Oscar without Swayze's help, as BBC News reports:

Goldberg said Swayze, 55, told director Jerry Zucker: "I'm not making this movie unless you put Whoopi in there." The actress was speaking on US talk show The View. She became a co-host on the programme last year. Goldberg said she had not spoken to Swayze about his health but added: "We want you to feel better – we'll talk soon, I hope."

That's probably not entirely true – after her Oscar snub for The Colour Purple, Whoopi Goldberg would have probably won an Oscar if one of her next films was Meet The Spartans – but you can't blame her for wanting to pay tribute to Patrick Swayze, even though it might be a bit more traditional if she'd actually let him die first.

Anyway, join us next week when Whoopi Goldberg somehow manages to shoehorn a mention of her Oscar win into a serious discussion about the prevalence of institutionalised infanticide in China.

Read more:

Goldberg thanks Swayze for Oscar – BBC 

Except one – thanks to a heartbreaking oversight, Vassilis Fotopoulos' speech after winning the Best Art Direction Oscar for Zorba The Greek in 1964 was cruelly omitted from the proceedings.

Oh, and everything Whoopi Goldberg ever did. Despite winning an Oscar – and being the Oscars host on four separate occasions between 1994 and 2001 – there was no sign of Whoopi Goldberg anywhere in all the endless montages on Sunday. And that made Whoopi Goldberg cry. On TV. Video after the jump.

Jon Stewart had better watch out, otherwise he'll fall prey to the Curse Of The Oscar Host. It's a curse you may not have heard of, mainly because we've just invented it, but it's still true. It involves people who have hosted the Oscars becoming uncontrollable emotional wrecks about shit that nobody cares about on television. It started when 2007 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres wailed about a puppy on her TV show, and now it's continuing with four-time Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg.

You see, thanks to the writers' strike, Sunday's Oscar show was brimming with the kind of dreary nostalgic clip montages that bore the life out of you if you're young and falsely reinforce the idea that things were better in the past if you're young. On and on they went – there's Cuba Gooding Jr, there's David Letterman, there's Celine Dion, there's fucking Snow White singing a bastardised duet of Proud Mary with titting Rob Lowe for christ's sake – and yet nobody thought to include any Whoopi Goldberg.

And on The View yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg had tears in her eyes thanks to the upset that goes along with being ignored by a tedious clip package in an over-long, obscenely smug awards ceremony. Look, here's the video…

Ridiculous, isn't it? After all, we didn't see any Xena Warrior Princess in any of the Oscar montages, and we doubt she's particularly cut up about it.

Then again, as the women on The View pointed out, Whoopi Goldberg was only the second black woman to win an Oscar and the first woman to host the Oscars at all, which does make her slightly significant. Maybe the clip researchers should have double-checked their list to make sure they weren't leaving anyone important out.

Or maybe – just maybe – the only person in the entire world who even slightly cares about any of this is Whoopi Goldberg, and everyone else is happy that she was left out of all the montages because it made the Oscars five or six seconds shorter than they otherwise would have been.

Still, though, Whoopi Goldberg's tearful reaction to the snub just shines a light on the difference between her and her predecessor on The View. Because if Rosie O'Donnell had hosted the Oscars and missed out on a montage clip, the Kodak Theatre would be a mess of rubble, steel and fragments of Jack Nicholson's skull by now.

Read more:

Whoopi Goldberg Chokes Up Over Oscar Montage – People 

In recent years, standards have certainly slipped. In fact, the way things are looking, even the likes of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Sir Roger Moore, and perhaps Big Mo from EastEnders stand a fleeting chance at Oscar glory. So let us present the Oscar-winning performances that surely should never have been…

7. Kim Basinger for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
L.A Confidential (1997)


'The Oscar-winning actress Kim Basinger?' Has a funny ring to it, doesn't it? Surely not the same women who polished the term 'wooden horse' as an unforgettable Bond girl in the unofficial trite Bond outing Never Say Never Again? Or the lousy and seemingly emotionless female lead in Tim Burton's original Batman? This isn't the same female lead that played a charmless possible murderess (even her sex scenes were infamously body doubled) in the mediocre Richard Gere thriller Final Analysis? To be fair, she was OK in the Curtis Hanson glossy noir that got her the gong, playing a beautiful but foul-mouthed and mysterious femme fatale. But did she really deserve to sweep the golden man from prehistoric fellow nominee Gloria Stuart? Nah.

6. Robin Williams for Best Actor
Good Will Hunting (1997)


You just know something is fishy when you see Robin Williams don a beard in the film's poster (he always seems to grow one when he gets 'serious' ie: Dead Poets Society, Awakenings…). But an Oscar as well? Please. What was the academy thinking? It's a half-hearted, half-baked, annoyingly bogus and seriously prestigious pants of a performance. Surely, this should have been saved for his more challenging and arguably atypical work in suspense thrillers Insomnia and One Hour Photo?

5. Helen Hayes for Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Airport (1970)


A little kind old lady playing a little old lady (albeit one who has a 'mischievous touch' ) – what a challenging part that must of been for the 70-year-old. She even played the same role in Herbie Rides Again. Surely, this award was just one of those 'too old to continue much longer' sympathy votes that veterans Henry Fonda, James Coburn and Driving Miss Daisy's Jessica Tandy received prior to their unfortunate demise.

4. Judi Dench for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Sorry, but this was a miserable apology for not gracing her with the gong for her outstanding performance as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown a year earlier. Although she is equally stupendous in the equally royal role for the above, it's only eight minutes of screen time (an extended cameo at the most) and just doesn't warrant the award. The academy should have admitted to their mistake and snatched the Oscar back off Hunt instead of tarnishing another British actress' opportunity in the process – namely Brenda Blethyn for Little Voice.

3. Gwyneth Paltrow for Best Actress
Shakespeare in Love (1998)


And from the same overrated film came another Oscar for the, generally overrated Miss Paltrow, for 'mastering' an English accent. But if we are honest, it's more like a trite impersonation of Emma Thompson than a performance of any depth or focus. Thankfully, the acceptance speech was equally as awful, so that redeems things a little.

2. Michael Caine for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
The Cider House Rules (1999)


And now for the opposite: a cockney doing a diabolical American accent. Sorry Sir Michael, but this is up there with your performances in Jaws: The Revenge and The Swarm for sheer overstated embarrassment. What a terrible casting mistake that was. What next? Stallone playing Jack Carter in the remake to Get Carter? Oh yes, they did that too.

1. Whoopi Goldberg for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Ghost (1990)


Whoopi won for her overblown performance in Ghost, when she should have won five years earlier for her remarkable debut turn in Spielberg's The Color Purple. Don't get us wrong, it's a hilarious and well-timed comedic performance, but it's just not got the Oscar clout it was awarded for.

[story by Oliver Pfeiffer]