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.
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!)
