Andy Richardson: My Oscars tips

The award for my favourite ever Oscar winner goes to. . .

In my world, Oscar is the name of mom and dad's pet dog. Woof. And yes, being a dyed-in-the-wool yam-yam, I'm happy to correct the new fangled spelling of 'mum' with the original Black Country version. So, the purposes of the next 600 words or so, mom's the word. Toot toot.

Skittish, ginger and fond of a good scratch under the arms – his, not mine – Oscar is the Cox's Orange Pippin of mom and dad's eye. He was found abandoned in a street in Bilston, which proved to be his lucky break. He found himself carted off to the local police station by a Good Samaritan, where he denied any wrong doing. Within a week he was given a new home by rescue-heroes mom and dad.

On Sunday, however, Oscar will be consigned to his basket with a strip of ostrich biltong as my mom and dad tune into the real thing.

The 87th Oscars take place at the Dolby Theatre, in Los Angeles, and the race is on between The Grand Budapest Hotel and Whiplash, Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Keaton, Reese Witherspoon and Julianne Moore.

For my money, the most exceptional Oscar winners of the current generation have been Kevin Spacey and Daniel Day-Lewis who, between them, have won an extraordinary five awards. I interviewed both during a particularly creative spring, four years hence.

In a career spanning 45 years, Dan Day has been interviewed approximately 5.6 times. When it comes to the media, he's notoriously recalcitrant. And well he might be. He's one of the acting professions genius figures.

The method actor is the only man in history to have won three Oscars in the lead performance category. His method approach is in the tradition of greats like Stanislavski and Brando. He'll famously remain in character for the duration of a movie, pushing himself beyond reasonable extremes to portray his subject.

He started his career as an understudy to the late Shropshire Oscar-nominee Pete Postlethwaite at the Bristol Old Vic. The duo made their big screen debut in Dances with Wolves before collaborating to retell the story of wrongly-convicted Birmingham Six suspect Gerry Conlon in their epic In The Name of the Father.

Dan Day had been cast first as Gerry and director Jim Sheridan had difficulty finding an actor to play his father, Guiseppe. He solved the problem: "I know who my father is," he told Sheridan. "It's Pete."

Pete was summoned to be interviewed in a London hotel. On his way, he visited a charity shop and bought a dead man's suit, ditched his Warrington accent and started speaking like a true native of Northern Ireland, as Guiseppe would have done. When he arrived for his interview, he asked to see Sheridan in his suite. "Who shall I tell him it is?" asked the concierge. "Tell him it's Guiseppe," he said, in Northern Irish brogue. The rest, as they say, is history and the movie won seven Oscar nominations.

Kevin Spacey, in contrast, was the most rambunctious, fire-cracking and sweary interviewee it's been my pleasure to listen to. In a couple of decades of hearing out rock stars, punks and drug-taking chefs, Kevin took the space-dust-coated-biscuit.

A 20-minute chat included around 40 profanities per minute. "f-, f-in' f-," went one particularly, tourettes-like sentence. A recording of it is on my answering machine to this day. Spacey was the funniest, most charismatic and most genuine subject imaginable. He told stories about drinking, about going crazy on set and about his love for the theatre. Hypnotic and mesmerizing, irascible and larger than life, Kevin put the pro into provocative, the thrall into enthralling and the fun into funny.

Neither man will be present for tomorrow's Academy Awards, though you can be sure they'll be back.

As mom and dad's beloved pet knows only too well, you can't keep a good dog down.