Golden Globe winner Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook) hosted Saturday Night Live and explained her “I beat Meryl” acceptance speech joke, and made a little fun of Tommy Lee Jones, along with the upcoming Oscar race in her opening monologue.
The “I beat Meryl” line that she opened her Golden Globe acceptance speech with was a quote from the First Wives Club (Bette Midler makes a joke to Goldie Hawn’s actress character).
“One thing that happened at the Globes, I need to clarify. I said ‘I beat Meryl,’ which was a quote from the movie The First Wives Club,’ but which some people took as me trash talking Meryl Streep, which is crazy. I would never trash talk any of my fellow nominees at the Golden Globes…but the Oscars are another story.”
What followed was a few one-liners about her fellow Oscar nominees (to Jessica Chastain, “In Zero Dark Thirty you caught Bin Laden. So what. In Winter’s Bone I caught a squirrel and then I ate it.”)
As for the ensuing Sunday morning quarterbacking reviews — it wasn’t funny; Oscar voters have no sense of humor — don’t blame Jennifer Lawrence. She didn’t write it.
She held her own with Letterman earlier in the week, despite a few nervous moments. He joked “this is one of our best rehearsals ever.”
He asked her how she’d learned to act so well, “I was a big liar when I was a child… I was just a pathological liar. (‘I said that Dad drove a barge and we were millionaires and I had to get my legs amputated and I spayed cats and dogs on the weekend.’) … I think I just loved stories Dave, I don’t think I was insecure. I was in third grade,” she laughed.
As for the Meryl feud “controversy,” when Letterman quizzed her about how she was responding to the twitterverse uproar caused by her acceptance speech, she said, “it’s never a good idea for me to wing it.” And as for the “dopes who didn’t get the joke?” asked Letterman, she laughed, “I wanted to make a public statement, ‘hey idiots, it’s a quote from a movie…I wonder what Twitter’s going to say now. I’m not even on Twitter. That would be like a punishment for me. Like a judge would have to be ‘Six months of probation and you have to write down what you think about random things nobody cares about’…’What’s anal leakage?’ dash, Jen Lawrence.’ ‘”
She did take the opportunity to set the record straight about an unflattering swimsuit photo in a tabloid depicting a Hawaii post surfing shot she insisted “is not my butt,” while willingly showing off several non photogenic photos for which she was glad to take responsibility, adamantly copping to “bloat” on more than one occasion.
Letterman’s answer, “A kid from Kentucky surfing, that’s cool.”
