Opinion: I’d Like to Thank the Stopwatch

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They’ve made careers out of speaking the lines that other people wrote, so who can blame them for wanting a few seconds more to utter their own?

Oscar winners have gotten everything but the hook for making overlong speeches, so what -- besides publicity -- is the motivation behind Delta Air Lines offering a round-trip ticket to anywhere, to Oscar winners who hit the acceptance-speech mark of under 45 seconds? What’s a trip to Paris compared to the wrath of a producer, an agent, whose name is lost to the tyrant Brevity?

Anyway, the Oscars producers have already made it clear that it’s 45-seconds-and-out. Not only have nominees been given tape recorders with a 45-second limit so they can try to practice to time, but at the nominees’ luncheon, producer Laura Ziskin -- who evidently consulted special-effects whizzes to make this happen -- had her speech burst into flames right in her hands after 45 seconds, to make the searing point: 45 seconds and out.

As for me, I think the time-clock tyranny should be up to the audience. Oscar acceptance speech time is relative; as Albert Einstein supposedly explained relativity, sitting on a hot stove for a minute feels like an hour, but talking to a pretty woman for an hour feels like a minute.

Two minutes from Helen Mirren or Peter O’Toole wouldn’t be enough ... but we’d be squirming and looking at our watches after 10 seconds of ... well, I won’t name names. If I did, someone might leave mine off an already overlong Oscar thank-you list.