How to make a memorable
Oscar speech

Note to Hilary Swank: We dig your performance in “Million Dollar Baby” and think you have a great shot at best actress.

However, we are bored of your speeches.

It’s great that you feel others deserve recognition for your success. But you’re eerily calm and regurgitating previous speeches. Surely Clint Eastwood must tire of you saying he gave “the performance of his career” and your hubby Chad must just nod knowing he will once again be called your “everything.”

This was also the case five years ago, when your Oscar speech was nearly a carbon copy of your Golden Globes speech (with the exception of forgetting to thank Chad). This is a major offense in award-accepting. Only Renee Zellweger, who inserts new directors & actors but gives the same speech verbatim every year from a shopping list she carefully extracts from her purse, does worse.

Acceptance speeches don’t have to be boring. They can be brief (Joe Pesci’s: “It was my privilege. Thank you.”). They can be controversial (Michael Moore’s “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” tirade in 2003). They can even inspire another film, as Tom Hanks did in 1994 when he may or may not have outed his gay drama teacher after winning for “Philadelphia.” (The film allegedly born? “In & Out.”)

It’s time to reach into improvisational mind of an actor and change it up.  Shed a tear. Do a little jig. Use a thesaurus. (And while you’re at it, thank your husband first.)

Here are some lessons we’ve learned:

Get rid of the laundry list
Despite the begging of Oscar producers, winners feel the humble need to acknowledge anyone’s contributions to their great performance (including, strangely, their lawyers). But how many times can you hear the name Harvey Weinstein in one evening?

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“Titanic” producer Jon Landau made the biggest mess of this when he read 45 names after winning best picture in 1998. His non-stop prattling made telecast producer Gil Cates “want to blow my brains out.”

One way to get around this is to limit your names. 1997’s best actress Frances McDormand (“Fargo”) glossed over the studio honchos, cast and crew by saying “You know who you are” and focusing her thank-you’s on just three people: The Coen brothers (one of whom, Joel, is her husband) and son. Russell Crowe spent nearly all his thanks on “one bloke,” “Gladiator” director Ridley Scott, in his 2001 best actor speech.

Another tactic is to lump people in groups. Thank “everyone involved with the movie,” your hometown, your home country. Even better: as more than one winner (Maureen Stapleton, Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts) has done, thank “everybody I’ve ever met in my entire life.” That pretty much covers it.

If you must do the list, spice it up
In 1998 two boys from Boston, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, brought their moms to the Oscars and wound up receiving a best original screenplay award for “Good Will Hunting.” No sooner had they begun their list in high speed that adrenaline took over and the volume increased to pep-rally levels (“Chris Moore! Yeah! Chris Moore!”). Damon and Affleck pumped fists and yelled over each other to the point where their voices were cracking, but it was a welcome shot of energy during a long evening.

It also helps if most of your audience doesn’t understand you. Pedro Almodovar, accepting best foreign language film for “All About My Mother,” proved this in 2000 when he paused in his list-reading to continually remind the crowd: “I live in a different country. We are from Spain. This is my culture.”

In 2001, Oscar producers tried to reinforce the 40-second rule with enforced cutting-off music and the bribe of a new TV to the shortest speech. Cinematographer Peter Pau (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) turned this threat into one of the funniest speeches in recent memory by pulling out his paper and breathlessly naming all of the Chinese-named cast and crew so fast the honorees were likely laughing too hard to listen for their names. It wasn’t the shortest speech, but it was definitely the fastest.

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