"Stay Weird"
Weird.
That would be me.
That's a word I cling to so often...
so many facets of my life are defined by that word.
And certainly weird would be no exception each time I watch the Academy Awards.
Weird.
Uh huh.
For me, the most exciting awards of the evening are the writing awards.
Yeah, writing.
Oh, I said it...writing.
Sure the acting awards are cool...and I do pose an interest.
Yay, Meryl Streep. Yay, Frances McDormand. Yay, Whoopi Goldberg. Yay, Sean Penn.
But...the writing awards...
I find myself leaning in a little closer...
moving closer to the television...
waiting...
not only to see what the academy constitutes good writing...
but to see who has turned their writing into moving pictures...
who has turned their dream into reality.
Simply, I love it.
And, yes, I know that's weird.
I'm not saying that I will ever grace that stage with anything I wrote...
but the dream...
the thought...
the idea that I could take my writing to another level...
to reach more people with what I've written...
even if it isn't Oscar-worthy...
the Oscars always catapult me into wanting to push myself a little harder...
a reminder that dreams do happen...
and that...if I just keep trying...
something that I've written just might be read by more than ten people.
Well, in that interim...
here are some of my favorite Oscar-winning speeches in the last few years...
speeches that inspire me...
speeches that make me want to be a better writer...
speeches that make me want to dream a little bit bigger!
I, too, can dream.
Jordan Peele
“I stopped writing this movie about 20 times because I thought it was impossible. I thought it wasn’t going to work. I thought no one would ever make this movie. But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it and people would see it.”
James Ivory
"Whether straight or gay or somewhere in between, we've all gone through first love and come out the other side in tact."
Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney
"Very clearly, even in my dreams this could not be true, but to hell with dreams! I'm done with it because this is true. Oh, my goodness."
Graham Moore
"I promise you do. You do. Stay weird. Stay different. And then when it's your turn, and you are the one standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."
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