What makes an Oscar acceptance speech one of the best Oscar speeches? Conventional wisdom would have it that if you’re lucky enough to win an Academy Award, you should keep it short, try not to bad-mouth anyone, and most importantly, just enjoy the moment. But more often than not, the best Oscar speeches have defied those traditional expectations. Some of the most memorable Oscar acceptance speeches are the ones in which which actors and filmmakers have used their time on stage to draw attention to the political causes of the day, controversy be damned; others just bristle with excitable chaos, explosions of emotion that feel all-the-more real than the overly rehearsed performances of gratitude that dominate the awards circuit.
Like the performances and movies that garner Oscar statuettes, the Oscars speeches that linger in the memory—and there have been hundreds of them in the many decades of Academy history— make us feel something. Whether we’re watching a loveable underdog or a legend of the game who is finally being given their dues, their time on the Oscars stage sticks in the mind for what they say, and how they perform, as much as the occasion itself. Hence why we keep coming back to Olivia Colman’s win for The Favourite (listed below, of course)—it’s just beautiful as hell. Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night, we ranked the greatest Oscars speeches of all time.
8. Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor, The Revenant (2016)
Looking back on it, it was a pretty rough year for Best Actor when Leonardo DiCaprio finally won; of his fellow nominees, you might say that Michael Fassbender was robbed for Steve Jobs, but the Academy has already doled out more than enough Oscars for biopics. Even so, this was still more of a “lifetime achievement” award than it was for The Revenant, a fine performance in a fine film, albeit the least inspiring of Leo’s now seven nominations. (Real ones know he should’ve taken home a second statue in 2020 for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.) Nevertheless, DiCaprio made up for lost time with a blockbuster of an acceptance speech, teeming with Hollywood regality and calm charisma. To start, as is tradition, he gets through the obligatory thank-yous, rehearsed down to the syllable; you can really tell that he had plenty of time to prepare. But then his speech takes an outwardly political turn, ending with an impassioned call to arms against the climate crisis. “Let us not take this planet for granted,” he says. “I do not take tonight for granted.”
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