“And the Oscar goes to…”
BY
Kate Wolf
A taxonomy of Oscar speeches.
Oscar Night at Metrograph takes place at 7 Ludlow on Sunday, March 10, screening in both theaters from 6:30pm.
Over 20 years ago, US viewership for the Academy Awards was at its height, with nearly 58 million people tuning in to watch Titanic amass a record-matching 11 wins at the 70th ceremony, in 1998. Since that apex, ratings have sagged to reside somewhere in the high teens, and even the spectacle of Will Smith slapping host Chris Rock across the face in 2022 brought in only a nominal increase in viewers last year, eager to see what other hijinks lay in store.
Knowing a bit of the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I can’t say this downslope seems like a great tragedy. Best known for the annual awards night to which it lends its name, the organization was almost certainly founded—in 1927, at the behest of the infamously vindictive producer Louis B. Mayer—in order to deter film workers from unionizing across the industry. In the Academy’s early days, they faced off with Equity, the actors’ union; they behaved despicably during McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings; and, more recently, have struggled with racial and gender diversity. I, for one, would be deeply unhappy, though, if the awards broadcast were discontinued, if only because it delivers me with one of my favorite distractions: watching Oscar speeches online.
The Oscars live for me mainly as clips on YouTube. Specifically, it’s actors’ acceptance speeches that I like to watch and what the psychological motivation or meaning is—or if there even is one—I can’t quite say, only that I’ve come to recognize certain forms and patterns. For performers, the announcement of their win necessitates a complicated but seemingly universal medley of emotions and affect: speechlessness, shock, gratitude, humility, comradery, poignancy, love. A well-established stock drawer of phrases, already parodies of themselves, are chosen from, as they thank:
- The Academy, followed by something like: “I’ve been waiting a long time to say that,” or more humbly, “I never thought I’d be saying that.”
- The “team,” whose names are spoken clearly and concisely, perhaps from a list jotted down “on the off chance I got up here” despite the breathless waves of feeling.
- “All the people watching” in some less glamorous locale.
- The friends “who know who they are.”
- The powers that be, “for giving me a chance,” and sometimes a more pointed paean to a director (or more rarely a writer) without whom…
- The other nominees, and account that the award could have been anyone’s..
- Children, a partner, and parents, especially those watching on from above. That’s usually when the tears come. And I’ll admit, I’m crying by then, too.
Julia Roberts, winner Best Actress at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards
Most acceptances exist, tastefully or not, within these bounds, even when they scale to associatively ecstatic heights. Cuba Gooding Jr. winning for Jerry Maguire (1996) directs the crowd in a kind of chant, “I love you! I love you!” as the music chimes in to kick him off the stage. Roberto Benigni tells the audience in his lilting, charmingly accented English that his body is in “tumult,” and he would like to be “Jupiter and kidnap everybody and lie down in the firmament making love to everybody!” These examples, verging on the absurd, wonderfully sidestep the trap that the accumulated pomposity of an Oscar win lays for the actor, floating over it in near reverie. But the gauntlet persists: who will indulge in the attention, and who will back away from it? Who will manage to somehow translate authenticity despite the fallacy? Within the award, another award: who will be best actor at winning Best Actor?
Below are some of the more conspicuous contenders for memorable attempts, broken into five distinct categories. And the nominees are…
INDULGENT (COMMON)
Given the platform and plenitude of celebrity, when genuine movie stars win, I’m always curious—or rather, beset by schadenfreude—should they choose to lean into the indulgence option. Do they not already have every opportunity to speak publicly, and be listened to—are they not already filled to the brim with adoration? “I have a television, so I’m going to spend some time here to tell you some things,” Julia Roberts proclaims when receiving the Best Actress award for Erin Brockovich (2000), addressing the man with the stick to “sit down.” Firing up her signature octave-gliding laugh, playing a version of herself, she exclaims that she “loves it up here!” though the things she wants “to tell” are standard fare, and do not include a nod to the real Erin Brockovich sitting forgotten in the audience; the war with the clock, almost entirely self-serving. Matthew McConaughey, winning for playing an AIDs patient in The Dallas Buyers Club (2013), says nothing of the disease. He crafts a semi-motivational speech about how he lives his life by three principles, one of which includes always looking up to the self that he has yet to become. The speech waxes and wanes, ending hermetically as he quotes himself from an earlier film, “Alright, alright, alright,” a line from Dazed and Confused (1993), another version of himself, not from the future but 20 years prior.
SNIDE (OCCASIONAL)
Such displays of amour-propre can make you appreciate the recipients who choose instead to wear the necessary cynicism on their sleeve—while always stopping short of mentioning the campaigns for votes studios have waged on their behalf that can cost millions (or enough to make several Oscar-worthy films). These speeches crack open the door to the financial machinations that lay behind the purported celebration of excellence, if just by an inch. “I’d like to thank Miss Pickford,” Jack Nicholson purrs to nervous laughter, in reference to the image of Mary Pickford—the silent film star, and founding member of the Academy—on the screen behind him, “who incidentally, I believe, was the first actor to get a percentage of her pictures... And speaking of percentages, I’d like to thank my agent.”
Too much sour grapes, though, can have an air of hypocrisy. When winning for Kramer vs Kramer (1979), Dustin Hoffman references his past criticisms of the Academy, but does not specify exactly what they are, only going on to deliver a sullen sermon about the unsung members of film crews and the precarities of the acting profession.
Cuba Gooding Jr., winner Best Supporting Actor at the 69th Annual Academy Awards
SOAPBOX (COMMON)
A more resounding critique, perhaps, is to not attend the ceremony at all, or to even refuse the award, like George C. Scott, who turned down his win for Patton (1970) after the fact, calling the show a “two-hour meat parade… with contrived suspense for economic reasons.”
Marlon Brando’s famous denial of his Oscar for The Godfather (1972), delivered by Sacheen Littlefeather, for the depiction of Native Americans on film and in television, cannily acknowledged the ceremony as media spectacle rather than a popularity prize. The potential for some kind of meaningful political message or expression lies like a snake coiled in every speech, though it’s one that rarely bites. Winning for Klute, in 1970, Jane Fonda, during the most radical and outspoken period of her anti-war activism, rises to the podium looking struck. “There is a great deal to say and I’m not going to say it tonight,” she tells the audience, before quickly walking offstage. Her austerity, though, has already spoken volumes. By her next win, for Coming Home (1978), a film directly about the Vietnam War, she signs part of her speech to acknowledge the deaf community, and describes the movie’s inception in the offices of the Indochina Peace Campaign in Santa Monica, but is visibly softened.
These two approaches present the poles of possibility: championing causes—Frances McDormand’s thunderous command for an “inclusion rider” in 2018, Patricia Arquette’s call for equal pay for women in 2015, Joaquin Phoenix’s meandering cri de coeur for bovine freedom in 2020 (“and then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and cereal”)—or direct confrontation. Sean Penn, winning for Milk (2008), shames everyone who voted for Proposition 8, the measure against marriage equality, which may have not been an insignificant number of the audience given the Church of Scientology’s backing of the bill. Genuinely surprising, especially now, Vanessa Redgrave upon her win for Julia in 1978, a few weeks after Israel had invaded Lebanon, decries the “Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world,” for which she is vigorously booed.
METHOD (RARE)
Then there are the actors whose humility is so strong, who embody the parts they play so deeply, that they appear almost obscured within them, maintaining the distance of the performer who knows that their place on stage is to never lose graceful composure, to keep the show on. Mahershala Ali begins with the words of his acting teachers, “it’s not about you, it’s about these characters, you are in service to these stories and these characters.” Daniel Day Lewis, too, takes the award for the character he has played, Christy Brown, in My Left Foot (1989), saying it will encourage “Christy to carry on making his mark.” Geraldine Page, anointed as the greatest living actress in the English language upon her win by the actor F. Murray Abraham, says she is so glad the Academy responded to her character, Carrie Watts, the way she did, and gives the credit to Horton Foote, the writer who created her.
Acting Award winners at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards
SUCCINCT (RAREST)
Compared to the usual displays, the Method style is rarified, distinct—along with another approach, which is simply to say thank you, leave it at that, and not breathe anymore smoke up the statuette’s ass. Few do it—Joe Pesci and Julie Christie are examples— but it’s keeping in tradition with the initial Oscar ceremony in 1929, which, according to Michael Schulman’s book Oscar Wars, lasted all of 10 minutes. He cites the actress Janet Gaynor, the first Best Actress awardee, recalling how nothing much changed after her win. “My agent didn’t call me up the next day with an offer to double my salary… photographers weren’t camped on my front lawn. I just got up at 5:00 and drove off to the studio—as always.”
These days, materially, the Oscar equals a pay bump—the BBC puts the figure at $3.9M million for men, but only $500,000 for women—a raise in the profile of an actor’s films, perhaps a sense of artistic legitimacy if one was lacking. The resident fantasy though, of course, is that the award will change everything—or that everything already has changed; dreams really do come true.
The myth of Hollywood is as atomized and airborne as the American myth itself: upward mobility, transformation, excellence rewarded by way of hard work. Hilary Swank talks to her deceased mother, “It looks like living out of our car was worth it.” Russell Crowe speaks “to anyone who’s on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage—it’s possible.” Forest Whitaker addresses the gap between only ever watching movies at the drive-in, and then being in them, as a “kid from East Texas, raised in South Central LA and Carson, who believes in his dreams, commits himself to them with his heart.” The distance traveled to make it to the stage is striking, moving, nearly “unbelievable,” as Haing S. Ngor, a doctor who survived three terms in a Cambodian prison camp says when he wins for his first ever role in The Killing Fields (1984). Even if these recipients are the exception instead of the rule, they keep one committed, if just barely, to the fantasy.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if the Academy Awards’ sinking ratings indicate that we now all believe a little less in the Hollywood fairy tale, or simply that our relationship to moviegoing has changed? Do kids still practice their Oscar speeches in their mind, as I did as a little girl in my backyard growing up, interspersing it with interviews with imaginary journalists? For me at least, it was never about winning something—I never won anything—but simply wanting to be listened to, and recognized. Maybe that’s the dream which never really fades completely the older we get, no matter how many hackneyed speeches we hear. Deep down, who doesn’t want to be picked out from the crowd, anointed as singular, and get to thank all the people who helped along the way.
Kate Wolf is a writer and an editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Producer Buddy Adler’s Academy Award for From Here to Eternity stood amid hats in the coat check room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills during an Oscars after-party in 1954.
