How award show speeches can make or break actors’ Oscar hopes
Awards season is now in full swing. Last week saw the Palm Springs gala and the Golden Globes. The National Board of Review prizes were given out on Thursday. This weekend comes the Critics Choice awards.
All are prestigious in their own right. And, perhaps more importantly, all are auditions for the Oscars. How nominees deport themselves on the red carpet, glad-hand in the room, lose graciously or win endearingly are scrutinised by voters yet to cast their ballots for the season’s most prestigious honour.
While the outside world is probably aware of the lack of spontaneity involved in choosing a nominee’s frock, they may be more surprised by the level of planning and preparation that goes into the 60 seconds of thanks they deliver on stage.
“Speeches position you,” says Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety. “They establish the narrative. There’s so much that goes into it. It’s not casual and it’s not accidental.”
While lower-profile nominees have some free rein in their thank yous, those who are part of an overall campaign that is carefully calibrated and expensively funded can expect the content of their addresses to be steered before signoff.
Many an Oscar has been won or lost on the basis of a good or bad performance on a podium a few weeks before. Emma Thompson sealed the deal on her screenwriting Oscar for Sense and Sensibility when in 1996 she brought the house down at the Globes by reading out a diary entry she had composed in the voice of Jane Austen, as if she had attended the event.
Austin Butler’s muted and mournful Bafta acceptance speech for Elvis last year might just have given Brendan Fraser the edge at the Oscars a fortnight later, while Joaquin Phoenix’s anti-racism Baftas speech in 2020 sufficiently impressed voters for them to allow him the stage again at the Oscars, where he turned his attention towards veganism.
In 2018, Lady Gaga potentially kiboshed her own chances when she spoke for 13 minutes after accepting her best actress prize for A Star Is Born at the National Board of Review gala, during which she recycled lines already heard once too often on the circuit. “People really didn’t want to give her another award after that,” Vulture’s Nate Jones quotes a studio publicist as saying.
The winner that year was Olivia Colman, for The Favourite, whose singularly British charm offensive helped voters opt for her over frontrunner Glenn Close. Colman paid them back in spades with one of the most memorable Oscar speeches ever delivered.
Being fresh and funny, as well as – like Thompson – doing your homework is always appreciated. Likewise, so is displaying enough smooth confidence that Oscar voters (who still have Will Smith fresh in memory) will be reassured you will be no trouble on the night.
This year, that’s the strategy being adopted by Robert Downey Jr – the narrow frontrunner for his supporting role in Oppenheimer – who was relaxed and modest(ish) on the Globes stage, and used the platform to peddle a new narrative arc for himself as “most improved player”. Gaydos says: “He was so free-spirited and joyful and relaxed. And that nonchalance is appealing.”
The most hotly contested races this year are between Downey’s co-star Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, star of The Holdovers, for the best actor prize, and Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone and Poor Things’s Emma Stone for best actress.
All four took awards at the Globes – which splits the lead performance categories into comedy and drama – but at all other ceremonies, there can be only one victor.
In the best actress race, the fact that Stone has already won an award (for La La Land) is likely to count against her less than the fact that the Academy is still conscious of the need for its reputation to be burnished in the wake of #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite.
“Virtue-signalling,” says Gaydos, is still a prime concern for the Academy. “Trying to present the image that Hollywood cares, even though opportunities for women film-makers and minorities haven’t really got better and Hollywood is still white, elitist and male.”
In her Palm Springs speech, Stone told the audience she wanted to refute what an agent once told her – that for female actors, careers are a sprint, whereas for men, they’re a marathon. “That really was political,” says Gaydos. “It was personal. And if you disagree with that, you’re a bad person.”
Questioning a win for Gladstone is yet more problematic. In her Globes speech, Gladstone took time to remind everyone of the erasure Hollywood has previously attempted on Indigenous people, and twice flagged the historical import of her win – and, by unspoken extension, that of further victories down the line.
It is a similar approach to that taken last year by Michelle Yeoh, who beat Cate Blanchett to all the major trophies other than the best actress Bafta for her performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The whole cast and crew of that film, including supporting actress Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, became part of its trailblazing narrative, which began with Yeoh and co-star Ke Huy Quan’s early victories and peaked with a blistering reminder at the SAG awards by then 94-year-old James Hong that Asian characters used to be played by white actors with taped up faces and awful accents “because the Asians weren’t good enough”.
The big push for Gladstone appears to have meant the spotlight has been turned off her co-stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and even director Martin Scorsese, with all focus consolidated on the leading lady. “They’re positioning it as a movie that deals with our horrible treatment of Native Americans,” says Gaydos. “It’s clearly campaigning for awards on the basis of its messaging.”
Meanwhile, Giamatti’s speeches so far have added heft to The Holdovers – a sophisticated comedy in which he plays a cantankerous classics teacher, but also a film that could feel lightweight compared with a three-and-a-half-hour explainer on the inception of atomic warfare. Giamatti has achieved this by invoking his own family, who were teachers, and by stressing the profession’s importance.
This is a textbook example of how to successfully mesh the narrative of the movie – how it came to be and what it means to the world – with your own origins story. So the 14-minute version of Giamatti’s short Globes speech, delivered the previous evening in Palm Springs, was, says Gaydos, “everything you’d hope: emotional, compelling, resonant and impactful”.
“It went into great personal detail, and the more you make a dramatic story elicit empathy the better.” That Giamatti’s own history also includes an egregious Oscars snub 20 years ago for another Alexander Payne movie, Sideways, can only help.
Yet what may have sealed the deal was what the actor did after the ceremony: head to a fast food chain for a burger, where he was pictured by agog onlookers. Gaydos says: “I saw that photo of Giamatii at In-N-Out and went: well, he just won an Oscar. Thousands in Hollywood who have left the Oscars or the Globes have gone straight to an In-N-Out. You’re starving after a lot of these awards shows. It’s very relatable.”
Catering first and foremost to the suits in the stalls is essential. Greta Gerwig’s Palm Springs speech relayed how she was first taken to the cinema as a child to see a rerelease of The Muppets Take Manhattan. After the credits rolled, she ran down the aisle and tried to climb into the screen.
This was what she was still doing, she said, and would keep doing as long as she could, because she was “so proud” to work with “show people”. The use of such an antiquated term endeared her to an older generation that still makes up the bulk of the votership, even after their numbers were raised to bolster inclusivity in recent years.
Gerwig’s chief competition for best director this year is either Scorsese, whose own campaign is being muted for his leading actress, or Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan. As the Hollywood Reporter’s awards pundit Scott Feinberg noted, all the acceptance speeches for that film last Sunday seemed geared around warming up voters to Nolan, who has historically been perceived as a bit aloof.
Murphy called Nolan “visionary” and a “master”, while Downey said he had made “a goddamn masterpiece”. Picking up the best drama prize, Emma Thomas, Nolan’s producer (and wife) said: “I’m so pleased that Chris has been acknowledged because I just think that what he does is unlike anything anyone else is doing.”
Yet for Gaydos, the smartest speech of the season so far was not by a film star, but by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri, who took time during her Globes speech to thank not just her colleagues and her agent, but also “all of my agents’ and managers’ assistants. Thank you for answering my crazy, crazy emails!”
Not only does this line feel as if it could have been scripted for the character she won the prize playing – a woman who toils to support the kitchen superstar – it gained her immediate adoration in every office in Hollywood.
“Nobody ever does that,” says Gaydos. “That was the most brilliant thing ever. And it went over big time in the room.” Confirmation of this, if such were needed, came from one of numerous shots of Taylor Swift that night. “Oh yeah,” she could be seen saying, nodding and smiling for what felt like the first time that evening. “Oh yeah.”