Academy Awards Quotes

White people are very good at acting like they're not racist. They deserve an Academy Award for that.

I had no idea that such a thing could happen. It never occurred to me.My son told me. He called me and said, "Darling, I just wanted you to know that you have been chosen to receive an honorary Academy Award." I was in the back of this car, and I said, "Oh," and burst into tears, of course, because it was so unexpected and quite wonderful. I thought it's been worth hanging around all these years.

I' ve won awards. And they didn't make me feel bad winning them. They made me feel pretty good. But it also did not make me feel bad NOT winning the Academy Award.

I wanted to be an actor my whole young life. My dad was an actor, obviously - he won an Academy Award, but I had no idea what was involved. I had all the wrong ideas about acting.

As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any.

You can imagine what a trip this is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck-I get to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor at the same time.

If I want to be up for an Academy Award, I'm either going to have to play a tour de force of some kind or have a tracheotomy just before the nominations.

I'd like ten more babies and ten more chihuahuas and a few Academy Awards. Meanwhile, I enjoy being a sex symbol and making people happy.

I know a lot of actors picture themselves winning Academy Awards. I really just wanted to do a Christmas movie because it's the kind of movie that I really love to watch. I'm a sucker for the holidays.

Working in film, if you work with great directors, you learn that after every take you must let go. Sitting with my wife at the Academy Awards, we both let the moment just go.

I was very aware when I went to the Academy Awards that it would probably be my first and last time. So I thought my input should really be about fertility, and I thought I'd bring some eggs.

When we get to A League Of Their Own, I have to be Geena Davis' little sister who wants to be like her and wants everything that she has and is jealous and upset and mad. Well, that was easy. I mean, she has an Academy Award. I think I can be upset about that. She's 99 feet tall and she's drop-dead gorgeous and she's all feminine and pretty. I had to pretend I couldn't run as fast as her. That was hard.

To be recognized for your hard work is a true honor. An Academy Award nomination is one thing that, five years later, I can't form a sentence about. It has not made me feel like I can work any less hard. It makes me feel like I have to work 100 times as hard, to even be as remotely good, to work through an experience that could take me through that again.

I've done experimental work, I've done real conventional documentaries that were very successful, like Las Madres that was nominated for an Academy Award. And, from that moment on I felt like, "Okay, I can make that. Now where am I going to go?"

A person who actually knows how to wear clothes...they would look good in any clothes. You see this especially at the Academy Awards. Even if the dresses are beautiful and expensive and important, the actresses can't always carry them. Sometimes I feel like saying to them, "Act! You know how to act, you're an actor. You're about to win an award for, I don't know, convincingly playing that Venezuelan nun who went to war. Now act like you can wear this dress.".

I think I learned a lot on Beaches. A guy I worked with Dante Spinotti is a wonderful cinematographer and it was his first picture and he went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for "LA Confidential" which was great.

Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.

I was 21 years and 218 days old when I received the Academy Award for Best Actress. I had just stepped into an imaginary world that I'd seen at a distance for years.

I mean, people who watch Jon Stewart's show every night don't think he went far enough, because he couldn't do what he does on his show every night, because it's a different job. The same thing with Chris Rock. He can't come out and do a tossed-salad routine, the way he does on his HBO shows, because this is the Academy Awards.

We just constantly worked on second Saw film, it's not an Academy award level film, but we worked as hard we could to make it plausible.

Whether you're a presidential front-runner, or an Academy Award-winning actor, or head of a TV ministry, if you stay in the public eye long enough they're going to try and find a scandal.

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency in the west. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

My son was staying with me, and we got up to watch it, just before they announced supporting actress, he came up and put his arm around me. I think it was like, 'Either way, mom, I still love you.' But then it was funny because I saw it. I saw my picture, and I heard them announce it, but I had to ask him, 'Did I really see that?' I wasn't sure I was seeing it, but he assured me that yes, I was nominated for the Academy Award. We just sort of cried a little bit.

I get cassettes near Academy Award time of every movie that's made that thinks it has some kind of chance for a nomination - that's when I watch my movies

There's been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn't have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can't count the ways a director's vision is compromised.

I remember when I first won the Academy Award, and how much I loved it. I just wish there was an award around that you could really believe in again.

I'm very enthusiastic about the Academy Awards because if there were no Oscars, we wouldn't have as many good movies as we do have.

Now there are reports that Osama bin Laden would like to commit suicide on television. This is the kind of lead-in I have been praying for every since I came to CBS. Bin Laden is planning a televised suicide or, as I call it, hosting the Academy Awards.

I'd rather win a pennant than an Academy Award

I think that no matter whether you're Quentin Tarantino or any other kind of a rebel, or whatever, everyone who makes movies still wants to win an Academy Award, because it's like the Pulitzer Prize or the Congressional Medal of Honor.

It's interesting, winning an Academy Award as a young man... life-changing, but I'm just me within that. It's been very helpful for my career, but I'm trying to stay on the path I was on before.

Y Tu Mama Tambien' is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won't take a movie that's not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.

Payday at my house is like the Academy Awards. My wife says: May I have the envelope please.

At the Academy Award Dinners all the actors and actresses in Hollywood gather around to see what someone else thinks about their acting besides their press agents.

The Academy Awards for people in Hollywood is like the Super Bowl, the presidential inauguration and winning the NBA championship rolled up into one.

I think that no matter whether you're Quentin Tarantino or any other kind of a rebel, or whatever, everyone who makes movies still wants to win an Academy Award, because it's like the Pulitzer Prize or the Congressional Medal Of Honor. It's the best endorsement you could get as a moviemaker.

Most actors don't understand acting. I think it's an art form that craft is out the window. I don't think people get it at all, most of the time. Or they get some of it, not all of it. If you get an Academy Award nomination, you think 95 percent of the profession is unemployed at any given time, most people will never even find work as an actor, and the ones who do will probably make $50,000 a year at the most if they're lucky. Some will never do Broadway. Some will never do a major role. And a really, really, really small percentage of them maybe will be nominated for a major award.

I don't think I will ever be able to really articulate how bizarre it was to hear my name at the Academy Awards. I'd watched in my pajamas the year before! I felt numb - dazed and confused. I remember feeling light - weightless. More like limbo than cloud nine. At first I was like, This is my statue; nobody gets to touch it. And by midnight I was like, Please, someone, take this statue; it's too heavy! So I gave it to my brother, and he went off with it.

I know how the Academy Awards works: It's a card game, and I'm in the toss-up category.

The Oscar sits on some shelf above my desk. If there was an earthquake, I could actually be killed by my own Academy Award.

I didn't realise that Ridley Scott has never won an Academy Award.

Obviously it was an out of body experience to win an Academy Award.

Success has many ways of coming to you. Sometimes it comes right away, and then the film's instantly forgotten. Sometimes you can't remember what won the Academy Award for best picture, and then you can remember the one that didn't. And then sometimes in the afterlife, films that were not successful at all become these giant successes.

For a lot of filmmakers, their first goal is to be successful and make some money. But once people start doing that, the real goal is then to win an Academy Award. Because when they do, they know that their obit is going to start out, "Academy Award winner so-and-so."

I'm sorry, to boycott the Academy Awards is a slap in Chris Rock's face. To host is such a prestigious honor. To boycott it is not the issue. I think it does a disservice to all the African Americans that have worked so hard this year that will be attending and looking at this as an opportunity of a lifetime. I think it's a slap in the face. I understand the sentiment, but I don't appreciate the tactic.

It's much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.

I never make a movie for awards consideration. I will use the hope of getting an Academy Award a) to honor the people who work so hard and also b) it's the greatest Good Housekeeping seal in the world. It's the greatest brand. It's as good as Louis Vuitton and Dior in the world of moviemaking. It's the Super Bowl.

I won an Academy Award for 'The Cider House Rules,' playing an American.

There's a big difference between the National Book Awards and the Academy Awards. At the Academy Awards you can feel the greed and envy and ego. Whereas the National Book Awards are in New York.

You might be a redneck if you have refused to watch the Academy Awards since Smokey and the Bandit was snubbed for best picture.