Best Actor winner Adrien Brody on March 2 broke the record for the longest Oscar acceptance speech, as the lengthy Academy Awards show suffered a small ratings dip. It reached some 18 million viewers on American network ABC and streamer Hulu.
Despite promising to be “brief” on multiple occasions during his marathon monologue, The Brutalist star clocked a whopping five minutes and 40 seconds on stage, surpassing an eight-decade-old record.
The ceremony itself – in which low-budget indie film Anora clinched five Oscars, including Best Picture – overran to nearly four hours.
Late British star Greer Garson, who took home Best Actress for American romantic war drama Mrs Miniver in 1943, had held the record with a speech lasting five minutes and 30 seconds, according to the Guinness World Records website.
The Academy introduced time limits and the practice of “playing off” winners with music following Garson’s speech. But Brody on March 2 ordered the orchestra to stop.
“Please, turn the music off. I’ve done this before,” said the 51-year-old, who won Best Actor in 2003 for biographical film The Pianist.
“It’s not my first rodeo, but I will be brief. I will not be egregious, I promise,” he said, before continuing for another 90 seconds.
The preliminary 18.1 million American audience figure, shared by ABC on March 3, includes Hulu. The Oscars went live on streaming for the first time, with technical glitches causing some online viewers to miss the final prizes.
It means a recent three-year streak of improved Oscars ratings has ended. The comparable early ratings figure in 2024 was 19.5 million, for a gala that saw director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer dominate prizes, and featured live musical performances from smash hit Barbie.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Oscars ratings sank as low as 10.4 million. The Academy Awards telecast regularly topped 40 million just a decade ago.
The show on March 2 received generally positive reviews from the American media.
Variety called the 97th Academy Awards “successful in more ways than not”, and said Conan O’Brien “absolutely rocked his debut as host, walking the perfect line between acid and affection”.
The Los Angeles Times declared the show “generally navigable in spite of a pointless excursion into a dancing-singing salute to James Bond films”.
Indiewire called it “one of the best Oscars telecasts in years”, but The Hollywood Reporter found the evening “unstable” and “uneven”.
Brody’s extended speech was perhaps appropriate for The Brutalist, a 3½-hour drama that features an intermission. He plays a brilliant architect, haunted by the Holocaust, who moves to the post-World War II United States to begin a new life.
Brody used his speech to thank more than a dozen people by name, including his parents, Brutalist director Brady Corbet, co-stars Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, and his girlfriend, English fashion designer Georgina Chapman.
In a bizarre moment on his way to the stage, Brody paused and removed chewing gum from his mouth, tossing it to Chapman, who caught it.
“I forgot I was chewing gum. I’ve got to get rid of this somehow,” he later explained, in a post-victory interview on March 3 on American morning talk show Live With Kelly And Mark.
He concluded his speech on a more serious note. “If the past can teach us anything, it’s a reminder to not let hate go unchecked,” he said. – AFP
