Oscars: Full breakdown of speech length for 2018 Oscar winners

Earlier this week I detailed what it would take to get to a 3-hour Oscar telecast (and why I think they shouldn’t do it) that included a full time breakdown of last year’s show. Today, as an accompaniment, is the breakdown of last year’s Oscar speeches (once again, tabulated by AW forum member Vector) by category from longest to shortest.

With the 91st Oscars producers demanding no more than 90 seconds from announcement to end of speech, we found that only 29% of last year’s speeches fell under that strict time constraint. 17 categories went over that mark, some significantly, some by just a bit.

This breakdown details the time periods of the announcement of the winner to the stage, the duration of the speech and the total amount of time combined. Check out the stats below.

Average time needed to start the speech: 34.9s
Average time needed for the speech: 74.7s
The combined average time: 109.6s

The number of categories that were below 90s: 7
Shortest speech: Best Costume Design (Mark Bridges): 52s
The number of categories that were above 90s: 17
Longest speech: Best Actor (Gary Oldman): 211s

The amount of time the Oscars can save if all the categories finished in 90 seconds: 9 minutes and 16 seconds.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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