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The 50 Greatest Awards-Show Speeches of the Last 55 Years


The best acceptance moments can make or break careers, cement fandoms, and spark blind items.

Haddish openly flirts with Michael B. Jordan; chats at length about the giant many-armed goddess statue at the ceremony’s venue, TAO; gives a line reading from Girls Trip that Universal demanded be cut; and wonders why critics don’t have another TV show like Siskel and Ebert did. (See also: costume designer Sandy Powell’s “I’ve already got two of these.”) But third time winner and screen legend Ingrid Bergman’s acceptance for Murder on the Orient Express is even more wonderful for how she spends the rest of the speech either celebrating fellow nominee Valentina Cortese or lamenting how she doesn’t quite understand how Oscars rules work for international films. Williams then gave a speech to cheers that thanked the Irish people, mocked the ceremony’s set design, referenced Buddhism, and called Jack so thrilled “He could drop a log.” It’s so wild that it manages to make Day-Lewis seem painfully square, Nicholson seem so disarmed as to shed his trademark awards-show sunglasses, and presenter Salma Hayek seem like the only person in Hollywood able to corral them all.

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