Oscars acceptance speeches: What was the shortest and longest ever?
Academy Award winners now have a specified time to say their ‘thank yous’ but the actual length of winners’ speeches has varied greatly over the years.
Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors the best in cinema across 23 different categories at the Oscars. The awards night roll call includes four gongs for acting, one for the best film and other categories that recognize the technical aspects of cinema.
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Generally the winners in each category will take the opportunity to give a short speech, allowing them the opportunity to thank those who helped them in their work. As it is a televised ceremony with countless awards, performances and set pieces to fit in, the victors are given only a short period of time in which to deliver their message. Once your time is up, the music starts playing.
Today’s winners are asked to limit their speech to 45 seconds, but the actual length varies greatly. Some are content to share only a couple of words while others have gone on for several minutes, risking the ire of producers and organisers.
Shortest and longest Oscar acceptance speeches
They say that brevity is the could of wit, and for some Oscar winners just two words were required to get across everything that they felt they needed to say.
In 1963 actress Patty Duke received the statuette for Best Supporting Actress for ‘The Miracle Worker’ and simply said: “Thank you”. Likewise in 2010 Louie Psihoyos won the Oscar for Best Documentary and decided that a simple “Thank you” was sufficient to mark his victory at the Academy Awards.
In stark contrast to those two-word speeches, some have taken many minutes to thoroughly thank all those who they deemed responsible for their success. The most famous and, almost certainly, most lengthy of those examples came in March 1943 when Greer Garson won the award for Best Actress for her work in ‘Mrs Miniver’.
According to several reports her acceptance speech spanned more than five minutes, although it is difficult to put a definitive timespan on her iconic acceptance speech.
The oration was not preserved in its entirety and the Academy’s acceptance speech database only includes news coverage of parts of Garson’s acceptance speech. The total conversation time of the extracts available adds up to 3 minutes and 56 seconds but the full thing would certainly have been longer. Here is an extract of Garson’s 1943 speech, which is widely acknowledged to be the longest in Academy Awards history.
“I came to this country as a stranger five years ago. I’ve been very happy and very proud to be a member of this community and of this industry all that time,” she told those in attendance.
“And from everybody I met or worked with truly I have received such ready kindness that for quite a long while I couldn’t believe that it was true, but tonight you have made me feel that you have really set the door of your friendship wide open and that welcome is officially on the mat, and that is why I’m so happy.”