Academy Award Speeches

Reese Witherspoon’s speech at the Academy Awards (“just trying to matter”) was the nicest of the evening.  In her biography is the notation that she is the descendant of John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. 

Dennis Prager writes the speech someone should have given at the Academy Awards:

First, I want to thank my country, the United States of America.  Every one of us here has this country to thank for enabling us to live lives of unprecedented freedom and unimaginable affluence. . .

Second, I want to thank the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. While we bask in freedom . . . tens of thousands of my fellow Americans are confronting a menace to our world as great as that fought by previous generations fighting Nazism and Communism. . . .

I also want to apologize to these troops for my profession not having made even one motion picture about any of the heroic American fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. . . .  America is fighting the worst people of our time, people who hurt every group Hollywood claims to care about — minorities, women, gays — people who engage in the sins Hollywood most professes to oppose — intolerance and violence — far more than anyone else on the planet. . .

In fact, the only nominated film about people who slaughter children at discos, blow up weddings, and bomb pizzerias and buses filled with men, women and children is one that attempts to show these murderers in God’s name as complex human beings. . . .

There should have been a movie about this. Maybe, after a year, this person will make it.