Best Actor winner Adrien Brody broke the record for the longest-ever Oscars acceptance speech on Sunday night as a lengthy gala suffered a small ratings dip, reaching some 18 million people on the US network ABC and the streamer Hulu.
Despite promising to be "brief" on multiple occasions during his marathon monologue, The Brutalist star Brody clocked five minutes and 40 seconds on stage, surpassing an eight-decade-old record.
The ceremony itself, in which the low-budget indie Anora took five Oscars including Best Picture, overran to nearly four hours.
Watch: A roundup of the winners at the 97th Academy Awards, including Anora writer-director Sean Baker (pictured).
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The British star Greer Garson, who won Best Actress for Mrs Miniver in 1943, had held the record with a five-minutes-and-30-seconds speech, 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 Sunday ordered the orchestra to stop.
"Please, turn the music off. I've done this before," said Brody, who won Best Actor in 2003 for The Pianist.
"It's not my first rodeo, but I will be brief. I will not be egregious, I promise," said Brody, before continuing for another 90 seconds.
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The preliminary 18.1 million US audience figure, shared by ABC on Monday, includes Hulu. The Oscars went live on streaming for the first time, with technical glitches meaning some online viewers missed the final prizes.
It means a recent three-year streak of improved Oscars ratings has ended.
Last year's comparable early ratings figure was 19.5 million, for a gala that saw Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Oppenheimer dominate prizes and also featured live musical performances from the 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.
Sunday night's show received generally positive reviews.
Variety called the 97th Academy Awards "successful in more ways than not". It 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 three-and-a-half-hour drama that features an intermission.
Brody plays a brilliant architect, haunted by the Holocaust, who moves to the post-World War II United States to begin a new life.
The actor used his speech to thank more than a dozen people by name, including his mother and father, Sylvia Plachy and Elliot Brody; The Brutalist director Brady Corbet, co-stars Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, and Brody's partner, 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!'" Brody later explained, in a post-victory interview on Monday on Live with Kelly and Mark.
Brody concluded his speech with a more serious note.
"If the past can teach us anything, it's a reminder to not let hate go unchecked," he said.
Source: AFP
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