How to succeed at Oscar chatter without really watching.

OK, the glassware for your Oscar party is taken care of. This Bormioli Rocco set includes six red wine glasses, six white wine glasses, and six stemless wine glasses that can also double for highball duty. They’ll be there in time for the big night, February 22. So what if you haven’t seen any of the movies?

Oscar-party conversation is about production trivia, Easter eggs, comparisons to other movies, horse-race buzz, big themes - and you don’t need to watch a second of the eight Best Picture nominees to fake your way through that. You don’t have to lie, exactly. Just say the kind of thing that makes everyone assume you must have seen it, and shuts down any further inquiry in that direction.

Here’s our guide to sounding like you know what you’re talking about on Oscar night - and, in honor of the Bormioli Rocco 18-Piece Electra Wine Set, a bonus drinking game. Clip and save:

American Sniper
Chat cheat: “Did you catch Eastwood’s cameo in that church scene in the beginning? Brilliant. The man is our Hitchcock.”
Take a drink when: Some Hollywood millionaire describes the late Chris Kyle as a “warrior”.

Birdman
Chat cheat: “There’s no way you can really understand all the references in this movie unless you’ve seen Multiplicity.”
Take a drink when: Any presenter talks like they’ve always been Michael Keaton’s most devoted fan, despite Hollywood not giving Keaton any major work for years.

Boyhood
Chat cheat: “That liquor-store clerk is the same liquor store clerk from Dazed and Confused. Hey, let’s watch Dazed and Confused again.”
Take a drink when: Anyone says “12 years”.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Chat cheat: “Angela Lansbury would have been great as Madame D. It’s too bad she had to drop out to do the stage production of Driving Miss Daisy. No, seriously, that’s not a joke.”
Take a drink when: Wes Anderson’s bowtie is on the screen.

The Imitation Game
Chat cheat: “After Downton Abbey and now this, it would be weird to see Allen Leech in something where he isn’t wearing period costume.”
Take a drink when: Benedict Cumberbatch stares unsettlingly into the camera.

Selma
Chat cheat: “People are saying some of the white characters are misrepresented. I say, welcome to what the movies have been doing to black characters for years.”
Take a drink when: the camera shows director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo, both of whom were snubbed in their individual categories.

The Theory of Everything
Chat cheat: “I thought it was great how Stephen Hawking used that song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’ to practice using his speech-generator - the same song HAL sang in 2001.”
Take a drink when: anyone calls Eddie Redmayne “brave” for pretending to live with what the real Stephen Hawking has lived with for decades.

Whiplash
Chat cheat: “How about that homoerotic subtext, huh?”
Take a drink when: the camera shows J. K. Simmons and you think of J. Jonah Jameson.