War of words: who is winning the Oscar for best acceptance speech?

Winning an Oscar for acting has never looked particularly easy, even if certain types of performances – physical transformations, celebrity impressions – always seem to maintain an edge over others. One major factor contributing to the Oscar’s degree of difficulty is that the job doesn’t end when the movie does. There’s a whole season of awards campaigning requiring a different sort of performance – the equivalent of being thrown into an overtime that lasts far longer than the actual on-field game play. If awards season had a playbook for how to win this endless overtime, it would probably focus on acceptance speeches.

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There’s no better example than Demi Moore’s bonus-round performance at this year’s Golden Globes. As an awards body, the Globes are a longtime joke – a recently rebooted organization that can never claim any voting-body overlap with the Academy, and usually simply does their best to guess Oscar winners ahead of time, so they can continue to appear prescient and therefore important. But one way the Globes really can influence the real awards is by serving as a high-profile dress rehearsal where potential winners can try out their live-TV persona. (That’s the true utility of their oft-nonsensical division into “Drama” and “Comedy or Musical” categories for the lead acting awards; twice the number of practice speeches on offer!)

Back in January, Demi Moore may or may not have already been the secret favorite to win best actress for The Substance, but in the press she still seemed to be regarded as a nomination-will-be-the-award novelty, with Anora’s Mikey Madison considered a more likely winner. Once Moore took the stage at the Golden Globes and crafted a narrative about being underestimated as a “popcorn actress” throughout her career, expressing her gratitude for the opportunity to prove those unnamed male executives wrong, she also became a frontrunner.

In this particular case, her speech might have functioned as a genuine supplement to The Substance. She has relatively few lines in an intensely visual movie, and so conspicuously divides her screen time with her co-star Margaret Qualley, that she risked being seen as more of a special effect or a movie-star aura than a full performer. The Globes speech gave her a chance to speak for herself more directly. (If The Substance doesn’t exactly seem subtle enough to warrant the underlining, consider: has there ever been a performance that was too on-the-nose for the Academy?) In its way, it was an equally bravura piece of acting, almost a happier alternate ending to pacify anyone unnerved by the bloody catharsis of her movie’s actual finale.

Moore is the potential Oscar winner who seems to have taken the greatest advantage of speech-season overtime, but she’s far from the only one. Kieran Culkin, whose improvisational acting style obviously extends to his acceptance speeches, has implicitly promised an off-the-cuff moment when he inevitably wins best supporting actor for A Real Pain in March. This combats a major pitfall of practice speeches: the sense that recipients are repeating themselves. It rarely seems like enough to take a frontrunner down entirely; Jamie Foxx did the same Ray Charles imitation intro at a series of podiums in 2005, and no one seemed to mind. But it’s hard not to wonder if Culkin’s charming unpredictability has kept his momentum going at a time when his inevitability should start to feel boring.

Adrien Brody, meanwhile, could be read as seeking acceptance-speech redemption alongside his own comeback narrative for The Brutalist. Brody became the youngest best actor winner ever for The Pianist back in 2003, and capped his victory by planting an unexpected kiss on presenter Halle Berry. At the time, the moment was seen as joyfully spontaneous; more than two decades later, the clip radiates discomfort, a weird previsioning of Brody’s other low moments of embarrassment to come (like introducing a Saturday Night Live musical guest in a Rastafarian guise, a moment re-aired on the show’s recent 50th-anniversary special in a segment about material that hasn’t aged well). His speeches at the Baftas and the Critics’ Choice Awards have been, by comparison, far more measured, even leisurely, as if he’s hoping his respectfulness and even keel will really sink in for the audience. This was barely even subtext at the CCA ceremony: “I know very clearly that these moments are far and few between in an actor’s life and I do not take this for granted,” he said toward the end. Brody’s emotions in these speeches seem genuine, but his presentation feels a bit dutiful, like he’s just barely holding on to a lead over Timothée Chalamet and doesn’t want to upset the balance. (If Chalamet wins, he would also steal Brody’s youngest-ever record; he would also be an unavoidably fresher speech, as he hasn’t won nearly so many pre-Oscar prizes.)

Is this stuff even fair to parse? Probably not. It’s even less fair that it’s possible to look at directors – not trained performers, after all – and compare the Anora director Sean Baker’s easygoing, cinema-culture cheer (he advocated for the re-expansion of the theatrical window at the DGA awards, a topic so industry-wonky it could only be charming) with Brody’s Brutalist director Brady Corbet repeatedly appearing uncomfortable and unimpressed with his own victories. It threatens to turn an already ridiculous awards race into even more of a student-council-level popularity contest.

But monitoring acceptance speeches may also speak to a different awards-season impulse. Some have argued that comparing disparate performances is inherently unfair, and that a better metric would be to see a group of actors each take on the same part. That’s logistically impossible, and comes with its own set of limitations – but in a way, the acceptance-speech circuit is a form of that silly, ephemeral challenge. Every speech-giving performer is reacting to the same basic situation: winning an award that’s cool, but not quite an Oscar, while displaying gratitude for the recognition and hiding disappointment that it’s not the prize everyone remembers. If awards show ultimately treat art more like sports (and they do!), acceptance speeches, arbitrary as they should be, might also be the closest we ever get to a level playing field.