New Delhi:
At the Oscars over the years, we have seen it all with the winners’ speeches, ranging from dull, endless, cringe, heartwarming, or, when we’re lucky, hilarious.
A few stick in the mind, from the astounded gasps of an 11-year-old Anna Paquin to Patricia Arquette’s rousing feminist oration that brought Meryl Streep to her feet for a standing ovation.
As per the analysis done by AFP, of nearly 2,100 speeches dating back to March 1953, 80% of them are by men. It says that winners mostly thank the Academy, their family, the film crew, or any movie’s influence.
Speeches averaged nearly three sentences in the 1950s, but in 2024 they reached 15 sentences.
On Tuesday, this year’s nominees were urged to stick to a 45-second speech.
Daniel Kaluuya, who received the Best Supporting Actor award for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021, delivered the most epic speech ever, with 70 sentences.
In 3 min 30 sec, the British actor thanked some 30 people from God to his team, taking in his family and “everyone (he) loves, from London Town to Kampala.”
Also, there were some 200 winners who took the fast route back to their seats, delivering just one-sentence speeches.
In 1954, when the Titanic trio Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen won Best Original Screenplay, Brackett barely got out a “Thank you” before the trio was ushered aside on stage.
Women, meanwhile, are the longest orators, averaging over nine sentences, while men average over seven.
As per the category, Best Actress winners deliver the longest speeches, with 18 sentences, which is two and a half more than their male counterparts.
Most of the thank-you speeches are all about saying thanks. The word “thank” appears in nearly 95% of all speeches in AFP’s analysis.
The remaining 5% are imaginative in their choice of words. Vincente Minnelli, for example, expressed his “gratitude” in 1959 when he received the Best Director Oscar for Gigi.
Arthur Harari won in 2024 with Justine Triet for Best Original Screenplay Anatomy of a Fall; his partner had given all the thank-yous.
As per the category, the Best Actresses with their longer speeches are also the ones who say thank you the most, using “thank” 6.2 times on average.
Positively loquacious with her more than 60 sentences, Halle Berry dedicated half of her thanks when she became the first Black actress in Oscar history to win, for Monster’s Ball in 2002. After opening with two “Oh my Gods” followed by “this moment is so much bigger than (her),” she dedicated her award to “every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
In contrast, Frances McDormand, not one to mince her words, almost skipped the “thanks” entirely when she won her first of three top actress awards for Fargo in 1997 by the Coen brothers. She did slip one in right at the end, “Thank you for acknowledging our work,” and congratulated the producers for “allowing directors to make autonomous casting decisions based on qualifications and not just market value.”.
The giver of the golden statuette, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is the most frequently cited entity in speeches. In the 1950s it featured in one of the 12 speeches, and in the last decade it just came in one speech.
Another frequent reference is to “God,” appearing nearly 190 times in over 140 speeches.
More than 6 out of 10 occurrences refer to the religious figure, among which slightly less than half are phrases like “God bless” to the audience, America, the Academy…
Among all instances of “God,” one in five corresponds to the phrase “Oh (my) God,” which does not directly refer to the religious figure.
Among individuals, Hollywood titan Steven Spielberg, a 23-time nominee and 3-time winner, is the most mentioned name, coming up around 40 times.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
