Peter Bradshaw on awards ceremonies

We are deep into awards season: the Golden Globes have just happened, the Baftas are soon, the Oscars just after them. It's a tricky time for film critics. Our intensely crafted opinions now seem laughably irrelevant. The best position to take is: if the Oscars concur with your reviews, that shows how ­prescient and savvy you are. If they do not, well, that shows how tough-minded and independent you are, free from the tinselly nonsense of Oscar night. But this isn't why I break into a cold sweat at the subject of awards. A few years ago, I had a ­traumatising ­experience at the London Critics' ­Circle awards. I found myself at a table with Charles Dance and his ­companion: a tall, beautiful Frenchwoman with ­elegantly frizzy big hair. As the evening wore on, no food was served, due to a problem in the kitchens. But the wines were various and plentiful. I became bleary. Dance leaned across and, fixing me with those glittering eyes, asked if I had any connection with the event. I eagerly told him I was presenting an award, but if I hoped to claim sparkly co-celeb status with him, this was entirely crushed by his reply. "In that case," he said, making a dismissive gesture with his fingers and jangling his cutlery against his empty plate, ­"perhaps you can tell me what's ­happened to the food ?" Then Peter Morgan came on and made a funny speech denouncing the stingy nature of the evening's goody-bags, in which the chief item of value was a biography of Leslie Phillips. I gave a wheezing laugh, a kind of whooshing exhalation of breath, that disordered the tendrils of the Frenchwoman's ­coiffure like a wind through trees. "Ugh!" she snapped at me angrily. "You sneezed . You sneezed in my hair! " "N-n-no," I stammered, mortified. "Yes, you SNEEZED in my HAIR!" I then had to do my speech, in which my jokes were received in funereal silence. Looking down at the tuxed throng, I could see Dance and his guest looking up at me, eyes blazing with contempt. I left shortly after, and could vaguely hear in the conversational buzz: "Sneezed in her hair." This never happened to David Niven.