Virtually since the beginning, the length of award show speeches has been seen as a quote-unquote problem. When Adrien Brody intoned for five minutes and thirty-six seconds at this year’s Oscars upon winning Best Actor, he broke the five minute and thirty second record that had stood for 82 years, set by Greer Garson for winning Best Actress at the 15th Academy Awards. Garson prompted the ceremony to enlist a 45-second rule for all speeches going forward, one lightly enforced through the years with play-off music that recipients have mostly obeyed to varying degrees. Brody essentially shouted the playoff music down, as did Julia Roberts when she finally won in 2001. Brody’s speech was the “Speed 2” cruise ship plowing into the deck, if inadvertently revealing in its incredible false modesty, but Roberts’s was fabulous, living out loud a moment she knew she would never have again, and going to show how the quality of Oscar speeches always evens out.
Peruse The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the 10 longest Oscar speeches and they more than split the difference between good and bad. Halle Berry’s was as good as it gets; Garson’s is so much better than the legend suggests; Matthew McConaughey’s was taking a ride on a glorious rainbow. And unless the show has something go terribly wrong, like 2022, or 1989, those speeches tend to be what are remembered, and what the royal we want, whether we consciously realize it or not. At the 2008 Oscars when host Jon Stewart brought Marketa Irgolva back out in 2008 to finish her speech for Best Original Song after her mic got cut, he was crystallizing the purpose of these shows in the first place; it was about her commentary, not his.
Alas, as ratings for the Oscars have dwindled with lengthy run times frequently cited as a culprit, the producers have homed in on the awards and winners themselves as the culprits, as if determining the problem with steak frites is the steak and the fries, shunting certain categories off-air and taking ever more dubious and/or drastic measures to shorten speeches. Jimmy Kimmel gave away a jet ski to the person who gave the shortest speech in 2018 while in 2013 the “Jaws” Theme by John Williams was employed as the play-off music. That last one no doubt looked good on paper but came off in poor taste in real life when the dun dun soundtracked someone giving heartfelt thanks. This is not exclusive to the Academy Awards, however. At the most recent Tony Awards, Cynthia Erivo sang off winners instead of playing them off, which just made something awkward to begin with even more so, while at the 2024 Emmy Awards, host Anthony Anderson enlisted his mother to intercede on overlong acceptance speeches. The latter was truly cruel and unusual punishment, a nominally cute bit that turned absolutely everyone into losers.
Impossibly, the 2025 Emmy Awards on Sunday night saw the Anderson bit, raised it, and made it worse. Host Nate Bargatze pledged $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Club of America with the key caveat that every winner had only 45 seconds to speak, and for every second a winner went over their allotted time, $1,000 would be removed from the donation while for every second a winner went under, $1,000 would be added. This was all “helpfully” tracked by a graphic that popped up on screen alongside the talking victor. There was conjecture that CBS intended this to limit political commentary, but in winning Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for “Hacks,” Hannah Einbinder still got her two cents in, proving it was doable, and anyway, while I certainly don’t doubt CBS’s fecklessness, as demonstrated, speech-shortening has been a recurring problem long before American democracy was going down the toilet in full view much to the chagrin of so many shut up and act ostriches.
The charity device wasn’t mere cringe, it was godawful. You could sense the producers sensing it because when Cristin Milioti made the whole night with her jubilant 90-second speech upon winning for Best Actress in a Limited Series for “The Penguin,” the money graphic did not appear to visually step on her joy. The gimmick caused so many winners to rush, speedreading as if making it under 45 second was the whole point, the Emmy Awards recalibrated as a goddam game show. It was enough to want to tell the hung-out-to-dry Bargatze to fuck off, as John Oliver did in accepting the award for Outstanding Variety Series, and which made me wonder, was this the post-modern point, to incite a reaction? If so, Oliver’s comment was bleeped, defeating that possible point too.
Though Bargatze’s bit was generally decried across the Internet, Slate chimed in with its contractually obligated counter take, tying it back to the “near-Sisyphean task to make awards shows interesting these days.” And that itself is an interesting word – interesting. That’s the word Emmys producer Dionne Harmon used about the woebegone Anderson’s play-off mama bit in 2024: “an interesting twist.” But since when are award shows are supposed to be interesting? They are supposed to be celebratory and stately but not necessarily in and of themselves interesting; the art and the artists they’re celebrating are what is supposed to be of interest. Somewhere along the way, though, award shows began, to paraphrase The New Yorker’s perturbable Richard Brody, apologizing for what they fundamentally are in the first place.
If the award show format itself is the problem for modern award show producers then maybe move the Oscars and Emmys and Tony’s to streaming where those of us persisting award show enthusiasts can enjoy them for what they are without so many attempts to contrive phony interest, or maybe just surrender, do away with the format altogether, and announce the winners in individual Tik-Tok bits. But if award shows are to remain on primetime TV, then can we please all agree to continue the 45 second speech with inferred wiggle room and do away with undermining so many moments in the sun with lame gags trying to speed them up? I’d like to think we could return to that happy medium of old, though just like the three-person NBA announcing booth, I fear award show producers have convinced themselves they can still reinvent the wheel.