The Academy Awards always have great speeches. Here are 15 of our favorites.
The Academy Awards have always been a great place for great speeches.
Over the years, we’ve seen incredible outpourings of gratitude mixed in with unforgettable exclamations of jubilee. Heck, we’ve even seen someone do push-ups.
We’ve tallied 15 of our favorite speeches from over the years, ranging from ones by actors like Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Gwyneth Paltrow, Denzel Washington and Robin Williams.
While this list is by no means exhaustive, it’s a reflection of what makes for a great Oscars speech and some admiration for some of our favorite Academy Award moments.
Sit back, relax and get those Academy Awards memories going.
While he won’t necessarily get a Lombardi, Ben Affleck might’ve already won Super Bowl 58.
In what’s one of the best Super Bowl advertisements in ages, Affleck reunited with Dunkin’ Donuts for a hysterical commercial in which he makes a boy band called the DunKings.
The advertisement features Affleck’s wife Jennifer Lopez looking very unamused by the DunKings, a music act that features Affleck, Tom Brady and a very apologetic Matt Damon.
While we’re not at all expecting a DunKings album anytime soon, you can get the DunKings Iced Coffee at Dunkin starting on Monday morning.
This ad really has everything, and you have to watch it.
Affleck has been one of Dunkin’ Donuts best spokespeople as of late, and this Super Bowl 58 commercial might be his best collaboration with the doughnut brand yet.
Everyone loved this commercial and a few really good jokes emerged.
The actor and coffee enthusiast was spotted recreating a viral moment from 2020 in which he had a pile of Dunkin’ coffee and donuts and dropped them — this time, he’s wearing a t-shirt with his old pal Matt Damon on it.
But it was for an ad that he’s reportedly doing for a TikTok account. That didn’t stop people on X (formerly) Twitter from taking both the old and new snaps and making memes out of them, which might be the first big meme of 2024.
The latest photo is the actor/director looking exasperated at something … but he’s also holding A CUP OF STARBUCKS!! IS THAT WHY HE’S SO UNHAPPY? PLEASE BEN, TELL US WHAT’S GOING ON!
Naturally, this became an immediate meme that everyone X posted. Here’s a sampling of what we saw on Monday:
Joe Mazzulla has one idiosyncrasy that I simply cannot ignore.
This is not a referendum on how Joe Mazzulla has performed as head coach of the Celtics. But he has one idiosyncrasy that I simply cannot ignore.
Mazzulla, who took over as interim head coach for Boston in September when Ime Udoka was suspended for violating team policy, was officially named head coach and signed a contract extension in February.
Boston finished more than 30 games above .500 and finished just one win shy of recording the best regular-season record in the league. For all intents and purposes, Mazzulla has done a good job coaching the Celtics.
The Celtics currently trail the Heat, 1-0, in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Joe Mazzulla watches The Town four times a week – name him the Boston Celtics Head Coach immediately pic.twitter.com/cOzXQbgBCm
But as it turns out, throughout this process, Mazzulla has stuck to a strange ritual that I can exactly endorse.
He told NBC Sports analyst and former Celtics big man Brian Scalabrine that he watches Ben Affleck’s 2010 film The Town four times per week. He says it is just a “Boston mindset” to watch that movie.
According to Malcolm Brogdon, the line “Whose car we gonna take?” has become a rallying cry for the Celtics during the postseason (via NESN):
“It’s basically just ride or die for your guys, the guys you’re on the court with, the guys you’re competing with. It’s having the mentality it doesn’t matter what we’re going to get into, we’re going to do it together.”
Mazzulla even wore the catchphrase on a hooded sweatshirt during a recent press conference.
Listen, I’m not saying The Town is a bad movie. But if I were to power rank all of the movies in the world based on how much I would like to watch them four times in one week, I don’t think that this movie comes close to deserving an honorable mention.
Others also seemed a bit caught off guard by this strange factoid:
Ben Affleck’s Air is the next great American sports movie.
One of the more classic American sensibilities is our persistent stubbornness to give up on something when we believe in it.
You can track it all the way back to the Revolutionary War to find a bunch of scrappy, powdered-wig wearing forefathers who were so against paying those ridiculous taxes on their goods that they’d go to battle for freedom.
For all of the flaws that engulf the idea of “American exceptionalism,” we are an exceptionally headstrong people when we want something.
Ben Affleck’s Air walks the fine line in extolling these virtues. On one hand, there is a direct thrill in watching Affleck’s dramatization of how once-underdog shoe company Nike usurped the basketball competition giants of Adidas and Converse to land Michael Jordan’s sponsorship.
Affleck’s as gifted behind the camera as he is in front of it, and he knows how to ring from history a snappy, monologue-filled headrush of racing against the clock and defying the odds on the sheer power of belief and savvy corporate maneuvering.
You get all the archetypes of the underdog story: the guy we root for who powers himself on good-faith tenets (Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro), the benevolent authority figure who pushes our protagonist when necessary (Affleck’s Phil Knight), the supporting players who fuel our protagonist’s efforts (Jason Bateman’s Rob Strasser, Chris Tucker’s Howard White, Matthew Maher’s Peter Moore) and the moral center who makes everything happen (Viola Davis’ Deloris Jordan).
The villain is more of an obelisk, a system that seeks to use sponsorship to build up product rather than the other way around. Vaccaro’s genius in seeing Michael Jordan’s potential was understanding that he was the marquee event, not the sneaker he was sporting. As a couple of our main players note throughout the film, it’s not about the shoe as much as the person who was wearing it.
As your sneaker closet may spoil for you, Nike succeeded in courting Jordan against the firm pushes of Adidas and Converse. The Air Jordan absolutely changed the basketball shoe world. The deal revolutionized the way we market products around athletes and forever altered the means of compensation on sponsorship deals to build up the individual as much as the company. In a little boardroom in Oregon, sports shifted for good.
Affleck’s film successfully rallies around the underdog narrative with the same gleeful disruption of sports movies like Jerry Maguire and Moneyball. Those pillars of sporting films – the former fictional, the latter inspired by real life – dealt directly with merry marauders who pushed against the old guard of athletics and found a new way forward.
Air is an outstanding example of how to execute that story with enough gravitas to get you cheering in your seat when a billion-dollar company is able to schedule a meeting with an NBA player for a marketing pitch.
It’s a hair-raising, chest-pumping sprint to the finish, built on inspirational platitudes and fiercely written exchanges about ideals. Alex Convery’s script would make Aaron Sorkin proud, and its entertainingly clinical dismantling of power structures would have Steven Soderbergh foaming at the mouth.
Damon is the perfect fixture point, with he and Affleck’s scenes together channeling that uncanny chemistry that they’ll always have. They’re the closest thing we have to a Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau partnership. Tucker, Bateman and Maher, all tremendous, further humanize Vaccaro’s quest, and Davis turns in one of her better performances as the Jordan family’s steely, empathetic matriarch who is hellbent on making sure her son’s generational potential is realized on the most just path.
Throw in Affleck’s quirky take on Knight and Chris Messina’s smarmy, full-throated imagining of sports superagent David Falk, and you’ve got one of the finest ensembles we’ve had in ages. This film can’t work without its cast.
Affleck’s direction is as precise and energetic as it was with Argo, another story about determined Americans racing against the clock to defy the odds. However, his film isn’t shallow enough to not address the Nike-wearing elephant in the room.
Indeed, while there is clear inspiration to the Jordan/Nike story, there is also the finicky trouble with hyping up a billion-dollar corporation’s quest to make a crap ton of more money. The means of production so often leaves behind the worker who makes it possible, and Air savvily takes the Air Jordan deal and adds vital context in the third act about the thankless system that largely governs our economic groundswells.
The film shows that Deloris Jordan wanted her son to get a cut of the Air Jordan shoe sales because she knew Michael was going to be a megastar, and she didn’t want him to get lost in the tidal wave of unpredictable American commerce. Jordan is one of the richest athletes to ever play because of the terms of the Nike shoe deal, and many athletes have benefitted from that over time.
Affleck’s film tries to show the importance of what the Air Jordan deal gave athletes all while making the quest to secure that sponsorship as exciting as overtime in a Game 7 of an NBA Finals. The film is too smart to ignore the corporate greed and risky optimism that can fuel our biggest corporate achievements, but it’s also nuanced enough to celebrate the marriage of good-faith economics and pure belief.
The Air Jordan deal left plenty of winners, and it’s easy to root for the victory. You have to remember that this is a story told through Hollywood’s purview, one that can’t fully unpack the complexities of Nike and its business dealings. However, Air can unpack the brazen foundation that builds all of our competitive successes, and Affleck’s film does so masterfully. It’s a film that inspires you to fly all while reminding you what it takes to have wings.
The movie tells the story of Knight and the partnership between Michael Jordan and Nike’s basketball division, which eventually led to the creation of the Air Jordan brand.
Ben Affleck, who directs the film, stars as Nike co-founder and former chairman Phil Knight.
Affleck stars alongside Matt Damon (as Sonny Vaccaro), Viola Davis (as Deloris Jordan), Julius Tennon (as James Jordan), Chris Tucker (as Howard White), Jason Bateman (as Rob Strasser), Matthew Maher (as Peter Moore), Chris Messina (as David Falk), and Marlon Wayans (as George Raveling).
This movie will have its theatrical release in the United States on April 5. Until then, you can watch the trailer to get excited and build anticipation for AIR.
You can also check out our side-by-side comparisons of the actors and all of their real-life counterparts:
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Jackson doesn’t appear to be hiding his frustrations.
We’ll soon be entering Week 3 of Lamar Jackson’s contract fiasco with the Baltimore Ravens, but really, this saga has gone on for a while.
And the stress appears to be getting to the superstar quarterback.
After Jackson refuted a claim that a fake agent was reaching out to NFL teams on his behalf, he seemed to share a status update on his thoughts about the mess in Baltimore. He posted a Ravens-themed meme of an exhausted Ben Affleck smoking a cigarette while wearing his No. 8 jersey.
While it’s impossible to discern precisely what Jackson meant with the meme, it was presumably in joking reference to his ongoing standoff with Baltimore:
Honestly, if this is what Jackson meant, I find it hard to disagree. I’d probably be worn down by an ongoing PR battle/war of words in public, too. This sort of stress can understandably wear a person down.
NFL fans on Twitter felt for Jackson, as they thought he was referring to his contract mess.
