In the international film business, independent producers often fantasize about their Oscar speech before a single frame of film has been shot. But not Denise Robert.

On the night The Barbarian Invasions won Canada’s first (and only) Oscar for a feature film in the foreign-language category, Robert was preoccupied with a diamond necklace worth a cool million. Just moments before the film was declared a winner, the producer realized that the Kwiat yellow solitaire she’d been loaned – was missing.

‘I really panicked,’ she admits candidly. ‘I’m thinking ‘Omigod, I have lost the diamond; I’ll be paying for it for the next 50 years!’ Then I realized that the chain had broken, so I started looking around on the floor, and it had fallen down under the seat of the people in front of us. But just when I got it in my hand, I hear ‘Barbarian Invasions’, so I jumped up, realized I didn’t have a pocket, and put it in my purse and I took it on stage. Usually when you go on stage you give your purse to someone else to hold, but I wasn’t letting the diamond out of my sight again,’ she laughs.

The upside was that handbag designer Moo Roo gave her the $2,000 purse they’d loaned her for the occasion – and that the kerfuffle tickled her funny bone right on cue. She glided onto the stage and quipped: ‘We’re so thankful that The Lord of the Rings did not qualify in this category.’ The audience cracked up (Lord of the Rings took 11 Oscars in 2004), and the seasoned pro then went on to thank all the appropriate funding agencies and distribs.

‘The Oscars are something else,’ Robert confides.