It's very nice that tonight BAFTA's classiest award goes to arguably world cinema's classiest filmmaker, as well as and I can testify to this, one of its classiest individuals, the great Ang Lee.
His career has been almost preposterously successful.
If you are one of those people, like me, who likes to look up your rivals and contemporaries on rotten tomatoes and rejoice in their splats, you will be sorely disappointed with Ang because his page is just a sea of red.
And it's not just the critics who adore him or the film festival juries.
If we, if he were actually to wear all the laurel garlands that he's been awarded in can and Venice and Berlin over the years, he would basically be a hedge.
He's also been incredibly successful at the box office and that of course is notoriously difficult circle to square as people in this room will know very well.
There are of course actually no people in this room.
And then there is his range from his earlier Taiwanese masterpieces like Each Drink Man Woman to the Ice Storm, to the exquisitely acted Sense and Sensibility, to Back Mountain, to Hulk, to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Lust Caution, The Life Of Pie.
It's almost impossible to imagine that one man directed them all.
And I for one have my doubts that he did, Taiwan of course is well known to be the world leader in the science of cloning, and I've long been convinced that there's almost certainly about half a dozen hangs out there.