The Oscars are meant to celebrate the drama that takes place on the screen, but over the years the awards themselves have also experienced their fair share of tragedy, comedy and sometimes farce.
Since the first gold gong was handed over in 1929, there have been unforgettable speeches (for the right and wrong reasons), plenty of laughable bloopers and a generous smattering of spats and scandals.
The wrong envelope
2017's ceremony of course hit the headlines when presenters Fay Dunaway and Warren Beatty were handed the wrong envelopes for the Best Picture award – announcing the wrong winner.
But even this mix-up wasn’t quite as cringe-inducing as one of the earliest- ever Oscars incidents. In 1934, Will Rogers announced the winner for Best Director by saying “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Come up and get it, Frank.” What he failed to remember, however, was that there were two Franks up for nomination in this category. So while Frank Capra proudly walked towards the podium thinking he’d won his first Oscar, it was actually the other Frank – Frank Lloyd – who’d won. As realisation hit and Capra slowly returned to his seat, Rogers later said that he wished “he could have crawled under the rug.”
What's my name?
Saying the correct name can be quite a challenge, as John Travolta discovered when he accidentally mangled the name of Broadway star and Frozen voice actress Idina Menzel, announcing her as ‘Adele Dazeem’. She nevertheless got her own back later when she jokingly announced him as ‘Glom Gazingo’.
At least John didn’t trip over with the world watching as happened to poor Jennifer Lawrence who fell over her Dior dress while walking up the stairs to accept her Best Actress Oscar in 2013. When she got a standing ovation, she said, “You guys are just standing up because you feel bad that I fell and that’s really embarrassing.”
Memorable speeches
Long or short, moving or blunt, Oscars speeches are a funny animal everyone treats differently. But the one rule is you have to stick to 45 seconds. That’s thanks to a measure brought in after Greer Garson gave a painful five-minute speech in 1943. At a time when winners usually gave no speech at all or very short remarks, her monologue given at one o’clock in the morning – she was the last winner of the night – didn’t go down at all well.
One of the few breaches of the 45-second ruling, however, was in 2001 when an emotional Julia Roberts ignored protocol that when the orchestra starts up a winner must cut their speech short. Instead, she ordered the conductor – whose name she got wrong – to stop playing so she could carry on.
Brevity wasn’t a problem, however, for Alfred Hitchcock who coldly blurted a two-word acceptance speech of ‘thank you’ for his 1968 Oscar – much to the raised eyebrows of the audience.
Marlon Brando, however, has to claim the most awkward ever Oscars speech – and he wasn’t even present! When he won Best Actor for The Godfather in 1973, not only did he turn the Oscar down, he sent Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to give his rejection speech for him, where she explained he could not accept his award because of “the treatment of American Indians by the cinema industry.”
But if Brando gave the chilliest rejection of an Oscar, the award for the most exuberant acceptance has to go to Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni in 1999. The moment presenter Sophia Loren announced his name as winner of Best Foreign Language Film he excitedly clambered onto the back of the seats in front of him and started waving and shaking hands with people in pure joy before getting to the podium to say “this is the moment of joy and I want to kiss everybody.”
DID YOU KNOW? The Oscars were initially called – and are often still referred to as – the Academy Awards. It’s thought the nickname ‘Oscar’ started when the academy’s executive director said the award statue resembled her uncle Oscar
An equally happy moment was when Charlie Chaplin received a 12-minute standing ovation for his 1972 Honorary Oscar.
It’s a shame such time-filling cheering couldn’t have happened in the 1959 Oscars when the show ended 20 minutes early, leaving host Jerry Lewis forced to ad-lib until the end. There were excruciatingly long rounds of audience sing-alongs, a spontaneous dance contest with Clark Gable and Ann Sheridan and a few mindless chats with the orchestra to fill in what must have seemed to Lewis like an eternity.