The Oscars as a TV program hasn't changed since the beginning: A host makes some jokes, then people give trophies with enormous cultural significance to the world's biggest narcissists, and then let them say whatever they want into a microphone for a few seconds—a couple of minutes if they're really famous. Also there are musical numbers.
Two years ago that formula really paid off: At the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony, Best Actor winner Matthew McConaughey capped off a moment in Hollywood history known as the McConaissance by finishing his rambling piece of stoner oratory with what has become his signature catchphrase: "Alright alright alright!" And it was an argument for the Oscar status quo: Why change a system that delivers that kind of wonderful weirdness into tens of millions of homes?
Answer: Because over the decades, that formula has led to countless baffling, cringe-inducing, offensive, horrible shitshows.
Having just read the transcripts of almost every Oscar speech ever—to be precise, it was only the 1,424 at Oscars.org, dating back to 1939—I consider myself an expert on these speeches.
I learned that most acceptance speeches are mind-bendingly boring, but some occasionally go off the rails. Five distinct brands of weirdness have emerged over the years, and each of them sucks the air out of the room in unique and wonderful ways. They are: drunken rambling, cryptic remarks that confuse everyone, offensiveness (accidental or otherwise), pontification, and my personal favorite, unnecessary eroticism.
Drunk Shit
The winner of the 1983 award for best animated short gave a pretty disastrous speech. His name was Zbigniew Rybczyński, and he arrived onstage looking pants-shittingly drunk, and spoke through a translator about god-knows-what (his speech starts at 1:55 in the above video). Then he wouldn't leave the stage when the music started, and tried in vain to kiss actress Kristy McNichol. According to a very sympathetic account of that night's events on a blog called Cartoon Brew, after that display, Rybczyński promptly wandered outside and got arrested for allegedly trying to kick a cop in the nuts.
But it was The Rat Pack who set the standard for drunken Oscars antics. When Rat Pack members were still alive, they were consistently on-brand at the Oscars—they managed to be incoherent at best, and offensive at worst. Frank Sinatra couldn't string a sentence together when he won the award in 1954 for his performance in From Here to Eternity. "I really, really don't know what to say because this is a whole new kind of thing. You know, I've—song-and-dance-man type stuff—and I'm terribly pleased," he eked out.
Fellow Rat Pack-er Dean Martin, meanwhile, didn't like to show up to the Oscars at all, but they dragged him there against his will (according to Johnny Carson) in 1979. It was Midnight Express composer Giorgio Moroder who won. But Martin, who presented the award, stuck around humiliating himself. He started things off on a weird note—looking at a cue card written in English and remarking to Raquel Welch that it was "written in Caucasian"—and then he basically made sure America knew that Dino still did not give a fuck about anything.
Offensive Shit
When grizzled septuagenarian actor Jack Palance won for his performance in City Slickers, and showed off his ability to do one-handed push-ups, it would have behooved him to not follow that up with some poorly delivered Vaudeville jokes about women. "As far as the two-handed push-ups are concerned," he said, "you can do that all night and it doesn't make any difference whether she's there or not. And besides, it's a hell of a lot less expensive!"
Perhaps the most profoundly racist speech in Oscar history came along in 1960, when extremely white actor Hugh Griffith won an oscar for playing an Arab in Ben-Hur—a role that required him to have his face dyed brown. That was all to be expected in the shitty 1950s, but when Ben-Hur director William Wyler accepted Griffith's Oscar, he acted like Griffith was heroic, claiming that his only regret was "that the people of the United Arab Republic will not be permitted to see his performance." How tragic for them.
Cryptic Shit
Cryptic speeches add a certain blink-and-you'll-miss-it brand of insanity that only rewards viewers who pay attention. Sometimes it's just a bizarre joke, like when Ed Begley started his speech by saying "I'm not Ed Begley," which was apparently a real side-splitter in 1963. Grace Kelly won in 1955 for The Country Girl, and said strangely, "The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel. I can only say thank you with all my heart to all who made this possible for me." OK, but what the hell was she really feeling? According to biographer Donald Spoto: probably loneliness.
There have also been some interesting shout-outs over the years that people tossed out like they were nothing. Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam thanked Dodi al-Fayed, the millionaire investor who later died in a car crash alongside Princess Diana. Louis Gossett Jr. matter-of-factly claimed that his grandmother lived to be 117, which if true would place her alongside the oldest people of all time. Short film director Bert Salzman appears to be the only person in Oscar history to ever directly thank L. Ron Hubbard.
My favorite cryptic speech is Carly Simon's (above), which ends with her addressing her children, saying, "If you found a television set on that island where you are, your mama's really proud." I think I know what she means, but I choose to assume she abandoned her kids somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, and told them to dig in the sand for household appliances.
Sanctimonious Shit
Nothing kills the mood quite like making a big, serious point about an Important Issue. Don't get me wrong—this can be pulled off gracefully, like when Tom Hanks won for playing an AIDS patient in Philadelphia, and briefly reminded America that gay people are human beings, at a time when it was still common for people to think gay people deserved AIDS.
Important Issues can also be a massive bummer though.
Marlon Brando split the difference. In 1973, he apparently wanted to raise awareness of the mistreatment of Native Americans, by staying home from the ceremony. So rather than accepting his Oscar for The Godfather, he sent a Native American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather to reject it in his place. She was very serious, and taught everyone a valuable lesson, but the holy-shit-am-I-hallucinating-right-now effect it must have had at the time means it's also inarguably one of the most entertaining moments in Oscar history.
Vanessa Redgrave (above) played a World War II-era anti-Nazi activist in Julia, and won an Oscar for it in 1978. But around that same time, she narrated a pro-Palestinian documentary, which really pissed off Zionists. Some right-wing Jewish protesters campaigned for her to be denied an Oscar, but she won anyway, and she let fly the mother of all preachy Oscar speeches.
She thanked the Academy for what she called a "tribute to my work," and then said, "I salute you, and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm, and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression." What came to be remembered in some corners as the "Zionist Hoodlums Speech" didn't go over all that well.
Over the years, plenty of winners have tried to outdo Redgrave. For instance, when Michael Moore won his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, he said to President George W. Bush, "We are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush! Shame on you! And any time you've got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up!"
George Clooney famously told the world that people who work in the Entertainment Industry are
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