Celebs' Most Savage Moments During Acceptance Speeches

Singer Fiona Apple was 100 percent honest when she took the stage to accept the best new artist award at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. "I'm not going to do this like everybody else does it," she warned the audience, before sharing an impromptu rally cry with her generation. "This world is bulls**t," Apple began, telling viewers, "You shouldn't model your life about what you think we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying ... Go with yourself." According to People, host Chris Rock quipped, "Let's hear it for Fiona X!"

Considering the time, the musician's speech unfortunately ruffled some feathers, with one NY Rock critic calling it "one of the most ridiculous soliloquies ever to be witnessed at an MTV Awards event" (via Pitchfork). Well, that's a bit harsh. According to Rolling Stone, Apple later explained on her website that she "felt like a sellout," writing, "All of those people who didn't give a f**k who I was ... were now all at once just humoring, appeasing me, and not because of my talent, but instead because of the fact that somehow, with the help of my record company, and my makeup artist, my stylist and my press, I had successfully created the illusion that I was perfect and pretty and rich." She added, "I'd saved myself from misfit status, but I'd betrayed my own kind by becoming a paper doll in order to be accepted."

When actress Kate Winslet won best actress at the 2009 Academy Awards for her performance in The Reader, she purposefully left now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein out of her acceptance speech ... not that we blame her. "I remember being told, 'Make sure you thank Harvey if you win.' And I remember turning around and saying, 'No I won't,'" the actress later told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. "And it was nothing to do with not being grateful. If people aren't well-behaved, why would I thank him?"

In addition to distributing The Reader, the Weinstein Company also distributed Winslet's 1994 debut film, Heavenly Creatures. She went on to claim to the publication that Weinstein himself would constantly imply that she owed him something, with the reminder, "Don't forget who gave you your first movie." Despite knowing the former Hollywood honcho throughout her "entire career," the movie star explained that she thankfully hadn't been a victim of his alleged sexual abuse. Saying that she'd "dodged that bullet," Winslet noted, "He was bullying and nasty. Going on a business level, he was always very, very hard to deal with — he was rude."

Needless to say, when Winslet won her 2009 Oscar and thanked "some of the people along the way who had faith in me," Weinstein was left off the list for good reason.

When accepting her supporting actress in a motion picture award at the 2019 Golden Globes for If Beale Street Could Talk, Regina King made a surprising, but admirable public vow. "In the next two years, everything that I produce — I am making a vow, and it's going to be tough — to make sure that everything that I produce is 50% women," she said. "And I just challenge ... anyone out there who is in a position of power, not just in our industry, in all industries — I challenge you to challenge yourselves and stand with us in solidarity and do the same."

While speaking with Entertainment Tonight shortly after, King revealed that actresses Jessica Chastain and Emma Stone, as well as producers Bert Salke and Tyler Perry, were among the first to reach out to her after her empowering speech. Noting that she wasn't scared of making such a big commitment, King said that she'd already seen how powerful words can be. "It's kind of like when I started directing," the actress explained. "All I had to do was start saying it out loud and the amount of support I got and people that helped find workshops and programs for me to go through to hone those directing skills, it happened as soon as I said it."

Hollywood was abuzz after writer and producer Shonda Rhimes delivered a powerful speech while accepting the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award at The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Breakfast in 2014. At the time, the showrunner of hits like Grey's Anatomy and Scandal made a risky statement that touched a lot of hearts — and got a lot of people talking. After calling the prestigious award a "participation trophy," Rhimes pointed out that she's really just one woman in a long line of women who have fought for equality.

"When I hit finally that ceiling, it just exploded into dust. Like that," Rhimes explained. "My sisters who went before me had already handled it. No cuts. No bruises. No bleeding. Making it through the glass ceiling to the other side was simply a matter of running on a path created by every other woman's footprints. I just hit at exactly the right time in exactly the right spot." Rhimes, then, was part of a "group effort" of women across generations. "Thank you to all the women in this room," she concluded. "Thank you to all the women who never made it to this room. And thank you to all the women who will hopefully fill a room 100 times this size when we are all gone." 

The speech was so poetic that media outlets like BuzzFeed News simply published the transcript in full.

When actor Jack Palance won his first Oscar at the age of 72, he apparently wanted everyone to know he still had it. During his acceptance speech for best supporting actor in 1992, the veteran actor opened up with a snarky comment about a certain 5'7" City Slickers co-star, saying, "Billy Crystal. God. I crap bigger than him." The audience laughed and clapped as he continued, "You know, there are times when you reach a certain age plateau where the producers say ... 'Well, what do you think? Can we risk it? Can we do it? Can we use him?'"

Palance added, "They forget to ask that you go out there and you do all these ... things. Like for instance, you know, you go out there, and you do these one-armed push-ups." At that point, the actor left the podium to literally do one-armed push-ups on stage as the crowd cheered. For his part, Crystal, who had served as host that evening, went on to make a ton of ad-libs attesting to Palance's manliness throughout the rest of the show, according to Yahoo! Entertainment. In reference to a child chorus stage number in Hook, the comedic actor quipped, "Jack Palance is the father of all those kids," and later joked, "Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign."

At the Golden Globes in 2018, host Seth Meyers joked during his opening monologue that Oprah Winfrey would "never be president." However, the media mogul's impassioned acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement Cecil B. DeMille Award later that evening seriously made us think otherwise. 

"I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue," Winfrey said, while turning her attention to the Time's Up and #MeToo movements. Calling them the "women whose names we'll never know," she noted that we'd lived "too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men." Winfrey continued, "For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up!" 

After the audience gave her a full standing ovation mid-speech, Winfrey concluded by sharing her hope for a time when "nobody ever has to say 'me too' again." While the whole speech did sound pretty presidential, the multi-hyphenate later insisted that she had no intentions to run for office in 2020.