The calendar tells us that a new year is dawning, and we know what that means: The two-month-long awards show avalanche is upon us, beginning with Sunday’s Golden Globes. And with awards come acceptance speeches. They go together like salt and pepper, ketchup and burgers, Beavis and Butt-head. Those speeches come in all shapes and sizes depending on the winner doing the accepting. They can be long, they can be short, they can be full of gratitude and meaning. They can be powerful or they can be interminable, or something in-between.
There is an undeniable finesse essential to delivering an effective and impactful acceptance speech. Yet, there is no specific playbook to learn the do’s and don’ts. That leads to speeches being wildly unpredictable. It can be 16-year-old Patty Duke uttering a simple “thank you” in 1963 while accepting her Oscar trophy as Best Supporting Actress for The Miracle Worker. It can be Greer Garson droning on for nearly six minutes after winning Best Actress in 1943 for Mrs. Miniver, inspiring the Film Academy to start placing reasonable limits (around 45 seconds) on speech length.
So we decided to offer a public service to potential winners who don’t want to be played off the stage and consulted four experts to give us their pro tips for delivering the perfect acceptance speech.
Our esteemed panelists:
— Bruce Vilanch, the comedy writer extraordinaire who served as head writer on the Academy Awards for 15 years at the beginning of the current century and is widely acknowledged to be the go-to dean of awards show scribes. Vilanch now hosts the podcast The Oscars: What Were They Thinking? and has a memoir coming out March 4 titled, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.
— David Permut, a veteran film producer and a 2017 Oscar nominee for the Best Picture contender Hacksaw Ridge. He is also producer of the forthcoming feature Twinless from writer-director James Sweeney that has its world premiere at Sundance on opening night later this month.
— Madison Brodsky, an entertainment reporter, host, and content creator who has reported on various red carpets over the past decade.
— Danny Deraney, a PR executive and personality whose clients include or have included Laura Benanti, Rosanna Arquette, and Illeana Douglas.
Here are their recommendations when it comes to the art of the acceptance speech:
Size definitely matters. While not everyone’s concept of “short” is the same, they all agree that reading off a list of thank-yous is never a good idea.
“Brevity is definitely better,” Permut explains. “I mean, I’m in the business, but the person who isn’t in the business watching at home can’t relate to all the names being pored over. We can relate to it when they thank their higher power and their mom and dad, and maybe their fellow nominees and the director. But they should stop short of singling out their agents and lawyers and managers and other parties who may be part of their team. People watching at home just don’t care.”
“Yes, keep it short and sweet,” Brodsky echoes, “because nobody wants to sit through a five-minute laundry list. The best speeches are 60 seconds or less and are very focused. They hit all the highlights. You can thank people who truly make a difference, but add a little meaningful story to it, something quick and sweet. Instead of thanking each member of the cast and crew individually, doing a group thank-you goes a long way.”
At the same time, you don’t want to appear to be rushing through your speech.
“After winning, you’ve got to pace yourself,” Deraney says. “Be cognizant of the moment. As my French teacher in high school told me, remember how long six seconds can be and follow the six-second rule no matter the oral task. You can get a lot of things in without thanking the family tree. Give thanks but remember it’s not storytime. Be appreciative, but also remember there’s a show going on.”
Vilanch believes that too many acceptance speeches leave the audience cringing because “people tend to get very-self-indulgent once they get up there and they’ve got the world’s attention. That’s when you’re going, ‘Get off! You’re done! You’re killing yourself!’ But you can’t get mad at sound editors who work in a room by themselves and are up there sincerely thanking people who mean something to them. It’s not always so cut-and-dried, because you don’t want to crush anyone’s huge moment.”
Vilanch recalls that the greatest example on his watch of an impromptu acceptance happened at the Oscars in 1992, when Jack Palance won Best Supporting Actor for City Slickers — and famously began doing one-armed push-ups onstage. “It helps to have someone who’s a little off to begin with,” Vilanch observes. “But yeah, the spontaneous moments are worth everything. The worst part is when they pull out a piece of paper or their phone, look down at the podium and start reading.”
One reason why the Tony Awards are “the most fun of them all” to watch, Vilanch finds, is “because these are people who do eight shows a week on a stage and know what to do when they get onstage in front of people to deliver a speech. A lot of people in the movie business have no clue because they’re not used to working with a camera. If they hit their mark, it’s a good day.”
“Prepare, but be careful not to over-rehearse,” Brodsky warns. “You should have a game plan going in so you know where your speech is going, but you still want it to feel natural and not like you memorized the entire thing. And then, end on a high note, like a really amazing funny quote or a meaningful statement, or a call to action.”
Deraney makes sure to prep his nominated clients before their awards moment “so they have a good handle on what to say. I like them to focus on how grateful they are, how wonderful it is, how much they love their fellow nominees. But it obviously has to sound real.”
For Permut’s money, it’s important always to practice humility when accepting an award bestowed by one’s peers. But the emotional angle is equally important and should never be shortchanged. “When you give a speech that’s just filled with emotions, people seeing and hearing it can feel it,” he emphasizes. “It hits people in the heart. It’s the same as when you see a great movie. It hearts you in the heart, in the soul. And it doesn’t hurt to make people laugh when making your acceptance, either. It’s all about coming across as genuine. People know when you’re being real and when you’re not.”
Sometimes, getting caught up in the moment can come back to haunt an award winner for being perhaps too real. Take, for example, the overcome Sally Field following her Oscar win for Best Actress (her second) in 1985 for Places in the Heart. What she said onstage has often been misquoted, but was actually this: “The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.”
“I think she regretted it for years,” Vilanch stresses, “but then Sally monetized it. She did a Visa commercial [poking fun at it] where she made a ton of money. She finally owned it and essentially said, ‘I can’t run away from this,’ because that’s what happens when you do a thing like that on the Oscars. It’s like fumbling in the Super Bowl. It stays with you forever.”
Brodsky uses the example of James Cameron‘s speech after winning the Best Director Oscar for Titanic in 1998 as how not to accept your award gracefully. The filmmaker famously held up his trophy and declared, “I’m the king of the world!” Even if it was a line of dialogue in the film, “it came across as the opposite of humble,” she says. “Good speeches start with gratitude, and to my mind that was a missed opportunity for Cameron to show how thankful he was for the project.”
“Leave the audience with something to remember,” Brodsky notes, “because the last line is kind of your mic-drop moment. So make it count.”
It should be noted here that while there have been plenty of memorable acceptance speeches over the years at the Oscars, they have nothing on the Golden Globes — where the alcohol flows and lips are loosened. In 1996, for example, Brad Pitt won the film supporting actor honor for 12 Monkeys and was moved to thank the makers of the anti-diarrhea medication Kaopectate. “They’ve done a great service for their fellow man,” he noted.
Two years later, when a teary Ving Rhames won for the HBO film Don King: Only in America, he called Jack Lemmon (nominated in the same category for 12 Angry Men) up to the stage and handed him the trophy. “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you, Mr. Lemmon. It’s yours,” Rhames said. Upon being met with a raucous standing ovation after hitting the stage, a completely discombobulated Lemmon described it as “one of the nicest, sweetest moments I’ve ever known in my life.”
And who can forget Jodie Foster’s unofficial coming-out-but-not-really speech at the Globes in 2013 while receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement honor. “I had a sudden urge to say something that I have never really been able to air in public,” Foster said, “a declaration that I’m a little nervous about.. But I’m just going to put it out there, loud and proud. … I am single. No I’m kidding but I’m not really kidding but I’m kind of kidding. … I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those uh, very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, and co-workers and then gradually proudly to everyone she actually met.” And it went on from there.
Vilanch recalls that the best line he ever heard in an acceptance speech was Charles Durning‘s in winning the 1990 Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “He said, ‘Some of you may be right. I may not deserve this honor, but I don’t deserve arthritis, either, but I have that’,” Vilanch relates. “At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. It was his get-off line. That’s what makes these awards shows great. It’s the unpredictability and the chance to hear something like that. It’s so much more interesting and memorable than thanking their agent or makeup and hair person.”
Brodsky cites Halle Berry’s win for Best Actress for Monster’s Ball — the first Black performer to win at the Oscars in that category. “She acknowledged how much bigger the moment was than just her. That made for an unforgettable speech.”
She added, “I also loved Olivia Colman’s speech after winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Favourite in 2019. It was just pure joy. She was clearly so surprised, and her speech was just so funny and real and relatable. What made it unforgettable for me was when she gave a shout-out to little girls practicing their speeches ‘on the telly.’ That was just so very charming and inspiring to me.”
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