“I’d like to thank God, my agent, my attorneys, my director, my personal trainer, the producers on the project, my husband, my dog, my gardener…”
We’ve all heard it before at the Oscars and every other celebrity-packed awards ceremony: a long-winded, tangential thank-you speech, curtailed only by the orchestral music awards show producers use to silence the winner.
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It turns out audiences won’t have to suffer through that at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. At Monday’s Oscars luncheon, where more than 150 Oscar nominees — including Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon — gathered to fete their successful year, Oscars producer David Hill announced some big changes to the speech process.
“As you probably are aware and we don’t want to embarrass anybody, but there is a long list of winners who have totally forgotten their directors, their husbands, their wives, their children and their animals,” said Hill.
To fix the problem, producers are shortening speeches to 45 seconds, and a TV ticker will run alongside the speaker while the speech is being given, listing the people the winner cares about.
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Nominees will be asked to provide a list of the people they want to thank ahead of the announcement, so producers can be ready to roll the right names once the winner is revealed.
“It’s a permanent record which could be kept, even framed and kept in the family forever,” Hill added. “How cool is that?”
It leaves a full 45 seconds for everything other than thank yous. Who knows what quips and rejoinders the audience will hear?
Around the internet, the Oscars luncheon received a lot of flak for its very apparent lack of diversity. In the group photo taken at the event, out of the more than 150 guests, only 12 people were non-white. It remains to be seen what arises out of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but rest assured host Chris Rock will do his best to address it.
This year’s Academy Awards take place on Feb. 28.
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