(Continued)

5. Don't Overprepare (In Other Words: No Lists)
All persons entering the Kodak Theatre should be frisked for 8 1/2-x-11-inch sheets of paper. Nothing larger than a 3-x-5 card should be allowed into the auditorium. If there's anything worse than a "spontaneous, unprepared" acceptance speech, it's a monologue delivered, head down, by someone (say, Jennifer Connelly?) who probably couldn't even read convincingly off a teleprompter. At most, your index card should have three items on it. For example:

1. One-liner joke
2. Suck up to X (director, studio exec, casting agent, soon-to-be-ex-spouse -- choose ONE)
3. Thank Academy

At least when Maureen Stapleton (Best Supporting Actress, "Reds," 1981) proclaimed that she wanted to thank "everybody I ever met in my entire life," she had the decency to refrain from mentioning them by name. Not even Cuba Gooding Jr. cited everyone he loved individually. If you know people who want to get mentioned on TV, tell them that's what your local news is for. Tell them to send in a digital photo of their cat or commit a mass murder and your local FOX channel will probably say their name on the air. And there's always call-in radio. But not at the Academy Awards, please.

Next year nobody will remember that you won an Oscar, anyway. If you want to make sure that nobody remembers it tomorrow, just start reciting a bunch of names most of your listeners don't know. Every time somebody starts thanking their agent and their lawyer and their illegitimate offspring, the water pressure in major cities drops precipitously from all the flushing.

6. Enough With the Flowery Speechifying
Too many actors think they can write. And too many of those who think that think "writing" involves grandiose rhetoric. One of the worst speeches ever was Laurence Olivier's 1979 honorary Oscar acceptance, which began:

"In the great wealth, the great firmament of your nation's generosity, this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric, but the mere fact of it -- the prodigal, pure, human kindness of it -- must be seen as a beautiful star in that firmament which shines upon me at this moment, dazzling me a little, but filling me with warmth and the extraordinary elation, the euphoria that happens to so many of us at the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow."

That's two firmaments in one sentence, which is at least two firmaments too many. Cut to 18 years later and the insufferably calculated ebullience of Roberto Benigni, who bounded over the seats and seemed to crib from Olivier's English-as-a-Second-Language soliloquy: "I feel like now, really, to dive in this ocean of generosity. ... I would like to be Jupiter in the firmament ... lying down and making love to everybody. This is something I cannot forget from the bottom of my heart."

Even famous Regular Guy Tom Hanks went all firmamenty when he accepted his first Oscar for Best Actor in "Philadelphia" in 1993: "I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels." (Precisely how many angels can crowd the streets of heaven to magnify Hanks' work has yet to be determined.) "We know their names. They number a thousand for each one of the red ribbons that we wear here tonight. They finally rest in the warm embrace of the gracious creator of us all, a healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident commonsense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all." Beautiful sentiments (I think), but the overwrought language and self-important delivery made many of us cringe, momentarily longing for the tiresome, moronic "Brokeback Mountain" jokes of the future.

7. If You're Going to Make a Joke, Make It a Self-deprecating One-Liner
When George Burns won the Supporting Actor award in 1975 for a Neil Simon movie ("The Sunshine Boys"), it was not one of the Academy's proudest moments, but 80-year-old Burns cut to the heart of the matter when he said, "It couldn't have happened ... to an older guy." (Indeed, it hadn't.) Contrast this with, say, James Cameron, the director of "Titanic," who awkwardly and unconvincingly exclaimed: "I'm the king of the world! Woo-hoo!" Not self-deprecating enough, really.

Stubby songwriter Paul Williams (star of Brian De Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise") actually got an Oscar in 1977 for penning some of the worst lyrics ever in "Evergreen," for Barbra Streisand's "A Star Is Born": "Love, soft as an easy chair ..." He almost made up for it by quipping: "I was going to thank all the little people, but then I remembered I am the little people." I'm sure it worked just as well when he used it on "Hollywood Squares."

Yes, these are corny jokes, and they are obviously prepared in advance. But they work to relieve the tension in the audience, caused by everyone's nervousness that you're going to get up there and make us all suffer by forcing us to watch you behave like an imbecile.

What speech tips do you have for Oscar winners? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

In addition to his  regular contributions for MSN Movies, Jim Emerson is the former editor of Microsoft's online/CD-ROM movie encyclopedia, Cinemania. He has written a lot over the years, mostly about movies, for many publications and Web sites, and is now the editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also publishes his blog, Scanners (blogs.suntimes.com/scanners).

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