figures of speech
With new rules for saying thank you, there’s more pressure than ever on winners to wow the crowd
LAWYERS, accountants and mothers, your 87-year stranglehold over the Oscars could be at an end.
Sunday’s ceremony will contain a promising new wrinkle that could force winners to say something more entertaining than the usual laundry list of thank yous. Nominees have been asked to fill out “scroll cards” containing the names of those they’d like to thank, which will run across the bottom of the screen.
Here’s hoping someone will have the guts to use that 45 sec- onds to say or do something we’ll all be talking about Monday morning and beyond.
So what would get our attention?
“I always get excited when they thank their publicist, but I’m looking for human emotion,” says MPRM Communications’ Mark Pogachefsky, a longtime film publicist and academy member. “You want to feel that human connection.” The job is harder than it looks. “You’re always trying to strike a perfect balance between humor and sincerity, vulnerability and selfindulgence,” says Victoria Wellman, a Brooklyn-based speechwriter. “You have to find the right tone. You have to acknowledge that you’ve prepared something, but make it still sound like you made it up on the spot.” In Hollywood’s Golden Age, stars such as Hattie McDaniel were rumored to have had their remarks written by the studios’ publicity departments. Nowadays, nominees pen their own.
Sandra Bullock gets high marks for her win in 2010. She used her role in “The Blind Side” as a way to talk about her own mother, thanking her “for not letting me ride in cars with boys until I was 18, because she was right. I would have done
what she said I was gonna do.”
“She was so thoughtful and honest and funny,” Wellman says. “Her speech was perfectly sewn together.”
In 1985, Sally Field moved into Oscar history for crowing, “You like me! Right now, you like me!” That may have been so, but not everyone liked her speech. Field was ridiculed as “corny.” But history has been kinder. “She was vulnerable. It was without filter,” says Pogachefsky, who worked on Fields’ “Places in the Heart,” for which she won the Oscar.
Another recipe for entertaining podium time is to push boundaries.
“Inappropriate is good,” says Jim Piazza, co-author of “The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History.”
Roberto Benigni became immortal after standing atop his chair in 1999, and Jane Wyman went down in history for accepting her award for playing a deaf woman in 1948’s “Johnny Belinda” by joking, “I accept this very gratefully for keeping my mouth shut once. I think I’ll do it again,” before walking off.
A palatable speech must also have humility. Many rolled their eyes in 2012 when Meryl Streep quipped, “When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, ‘Oh no. Come on. Her, again?’”
“She has the right to acknowledge her own success,” Wellman says, “but if she had just not said that word ‘again,’ it would have been perfect.”
Julia Roberts in 2001 refused to be played off, telling the conductor to “sit.”
“I hated that,” Piazza says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, please. I’m the biggest star who ever lived and I can do this.’”
Blubbering like an idiot might also be a bad idea. Gwyneth Paltrow alienated some viewers with her rambling, weepy 1999 turn.
“I’m sure it’s an emotional moment, but I think when you let yourself go unrestrained, it gives us, the audience, a message about who you are — and not in a good way,” Wellman says. “It makes us think, ‘Oh, God, those egomaniacs in Hollywood. They can’t control themselves.’”
The best shot at earning Oscar immortality might be to not win at all. In 1972, Cloris Leachman was despondent after collecting her Best Supporting Actress trophy.
“She said, ‘I had eternal fame in my hands, and I lost it,’ ” recalls Dick Guttman, veteran Hollywood publicist and author of “Starflacker.” “She said, ‘I had it all planned out. They were going to announce AnnMargret [as the winner], and she would start up the aisle, and I would throw my arms at her feet crying, “No, no, it’s mine!” as she dragged me up the aisle. I could have lived forever.’ ”
Charlotte Rampling, take note.