JULIE ONI
Staff Writer
It seems like, with all the work that goes into making films, the ultimate focus of Oscar night is preposterous.
The awards do not center so much upon the films themselves as the people involved in them, more specifically their ability to “perform” acceptances and look good spontaneously.
After weeks, months or even years of filming, the culmination of film projects reduces itself to two things: 1) What (or who) everyone is wearing, and 2) the speeches. Narrowing an artist’s work down to a 30-second flash of panic seems to be the more unbelievable of the two. No matter if a recipient makes a list (which seems awful cocky to me) or not, they always seem to forget someone. One of the most famous cases of oversight is Hilary Swank’s omission of her husband, Chad Lowe, when she won Best Actress in 2000 for “Boys Don’t Cry.”
Trying to narrow all of the influences of one’s life into a matter of seconds appears to be an even more stressful task than creating an Academy Award winning film.
This year’s Oscars were no exception. Immediately after Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s acceptance of Best Actor for “Capote,” he realized he’d forgotten to thank his girlfriend, Mimi O’Donnell, and their son, Cooper Alexander.
Lucky for Hoffman and the other winners this year, “thank yous” can now be posted on Oscar.com. Of the 24 categories of the night, only six people did not take the opportunity to post their gratitude to those they didn’t get the chance to thank onstage.
While I consider the online option to be beneficial to those who may have forgotten to thank a person who has been crucial to their success, the whole situation seems to represent the ridiculousness of the obsession society holds with Oscar speeches.
These speeches are so important that there are detailed Web sites dedicated to discussions of speeches gone wrong and what to say or not to say. The longest speech, according to Forbes.com’s study of 42 speeches given by winners of Best Actor/ Actress/Director since 1992, was given by Halle Berry four years ago for “Monster’s Ball.” It was 528 words long and thanked more than 23 people. The shortest recorded speech was by director Steven Soderbergh, whose word count ended at a measly 130.
Has this become some sort of competition within a competition? Who has nothing better to do with their time than count the number of times a recipient says the word “thanks,” and to whom? What is just as troubling is the belief of the show’s editors that they are the best judges of who should be thanked onscreen and who shouldn’t.
For example, Rachel Weisz, who won for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “The Constant Gardener,” was only shown thanking her co-star Ralph Fiennes, the director, the producer and the author of the film.
In reality, part of Weisz’s speech was clipped, in which she also thanked her two agents, her manager and her publicists. To please the public, though, the more popular are the ones publicized as objects of gratitude in the clipped speech.
Maybe giving speeches really is as big a part of the film industry as the films. Maybe when we watch a movie in the theater, we should be thinking, “I wonder how long Reese Witherspoon’s acceptance speech for this will be?”
Here’s to hoping such a tragedy never occurs. Let’s treasure the true gems of the Oscars: the films, not the speeches.
03-16-2006
