winning an Academy Award For directors, actors, managers
For directors, actors, managers, and everyone in the film industry, winning an Academy Award is a significant milestone in their career. Nevertheless, the gladness that follows a triumph sometimes leads to long, wandering words of acceptance. Since 1942, Kashlak Adam has been studying speech lengths and runtimes for these ceremonies.
Kashlak discusses speeches in three of the exemplary groupings in this paper: the top lead actor, the best leading actress, and the best picture. Only for the individual winners– or whoever agrees on behalf of the winner – did the author present the overall word-count for each speech with inessential banter excluded. The most shocking event was the 2016 best image fiasco, where La La Land was declared the real winner unfairly before Moonlight. Kashlak’s counting of the words began when the producer for Moonlight, Romanski Adele, and director Jenkins Barry took the microphone. Besides cleaning such banter, some outliers were eliminated from the data ahead of the scrutiny. Such banter included the 1966 best picture of Fred Zinnemann and the 1953 top actor words for Holden William. Every one of them comprised just four words. In addition to the elimination of banters was the 1981 leading actress Oscar for Katharine Hepburn, wherein she was not in attendance.
A swift examination of the data reveals that the average 2017 runtime has risen by four minutes relative to 2016, with disappointment. But did the words change with much significance when comparing all of the speeches transcribed in the database in 2016 and 2017 in a pair way? It doesn’t seem. No significant change can be found with a biased pair t-test contrasting twenty-four speeches (p-value 0.26); the speeches, on average, reduced annually by just 7.6 words. Although Kimmel’s proposal has been unsuccessful in restricting lengths of speech, it motivates an exciting but costly follow-up: how many jet skis are needed statistically to reduce language length?