How to make a memorable
Oscar speech

Be eloquent (yet concise)
And by that we don’t mean writing down your speech on a ledger-size sheet and reciting it with your head down the whole time. Both “Beautiful Mind” winners Jennifer Connelly (best supporting actress) and producer Brian Grazer (best picture) barely looked up as they read in monotonous tones, “I am so honored,” as if they were reading a statement by the real winner who couldn’t make it.

They could have taken a cue from the film’s best director Ron Howard, who sincerely admitted, “I’m not a good enough actor anymore to be able to stand up here and make you believe that I haven’t imagined this moment in my mind over the years and played it out over a thousand times.” He then launched into a genuine, pat tribute to his mother, who predicted his win before her death 18 months before the Oscars. “She also made this prediction for every movie I’ve directed since 1983.”

Another best director, “Traffic’s” Steven Soderbergh, in 2001 gave one of the best all-time speeches by eschewing individuals altogether.

“Rather than thank some of them publicly, I think I’m going to thank them all privately,” he said. “I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think the world would be unlivable without art.”

Some winners love analogies, but the Dan Rather nonsensical approach only works if  you’re from another country, aka Italy’s Roberto Benigni, who famously said in 1999: “I feel like diving into this ocean of generosity … I would like to be Jupiter and kidnap everybody and lie down in the firmament making love to everybody.”

But in the last two decades, no one’s soundbite as been mentioned more (at least since Sally Field gushed “You like me! Right now, you like me!” in 1985) than best documentary short subject winner Jessica Yu, who quipped in 1997: “You know you’re in new territory when you realize your outfit cost more than your film.”

Only blather on if you’re emotional

Kevork Djansezian / AP Halle Berry sobbed her way through an emotional best actress speech.

Face it: Though Julia Roberts giggled on for three minutes, you enjoyed her 2001 best actress speech for “Erin Brockovich” just for being in the moment. She pauses to make her dress pretty. She interrupts herself just to shriek, “I love it up here!” She wards off the “stick man” from cueing up the exit music. She also perfectly summed up any actor’s justification of spending an exuberant moment with their award: “I may never be up here again.”

This sentiment may prove true for best supporting actor Cuba Gooding Jr. (unless he changes his current course of script selection), but he made the most of his 1997 moment when his tears turned into a joyful holler of “I love you! I love you!” over the crescendoing music and punctuated the moment by leaping up into the air and hooting.

On the other end of the scale, Michael Caine made stars sob when he turned his 2000 win for “The Cider House Rules” into a moving tribute to his fellow nominees. While jabbing at rival Tom Cruise (“If you’d won this, your part price would have gone down so fast. Have you any idea what supporting actors get paid?”), he humbly declared that he did not feel like a winner, but won the award to represent “what I hope you will all become, a survivor.”

Less coherent was 2002 winner Halle Berry, but given that win made her the first African-American best actress ever, we understand the weighty emotion. Berry sobbed through her acknowledgment that “this moment [is] so much bigger than me” and gave thanks to mentors Spike Lee and Warren Beatty who helped her early in her career. She also remembered to thank her lawyer (what is it with lawyers?).

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