I thought about trying to parse the subtext of Jeff Bridges’ rambling Oscar acceptance speech (spoiler alert: he’s channeling The Dude in a seriously uncanny way), but to no one’s surprise, I decided to try a slightly more…quantitative method.
Behold, the 2010 Oscar Acceptance Speech Word Cloud:
(Click for a larger version)
Statistical insights, after the jump:
First, methodology: I took the raw text of all 24 acceptance speeches from the official Oscar website and fed them into Wordle.net‘s Word Cloud creation tool. To my surprise, the dual Oscar statuettes appeared along with the results; no Photoshop necessary.
Now, the results.
The total word count for 24 speeches came in at 1,934. Spread out over the 3.5 hour telecast, that’s only 9.21 words per minute.
These guys probably topped 1,934 words in their opening monologue...that shit was looong.
To no one’s surprise, the word “thank” is far and away the most frequently used word with 91 instances. That’s 3.79 “thank”s per speech.
The evening’s most popular superlative was “amazing,” with 13 uses. After that were “wonderful” with 10, then “incredible” with 9. I find that to be just “unbelievable” (2).
Not everyone thanked the “Academy.” That word only appeared 13 times, making about half of the winners ungrateful bastards.
An ungrateful basterd, but with cause.
The word “family” appeared 8 times. “Mom” and “dad” both came out evenly, with 6 mentions apiece, and “parents” got 4 mentions. “Wife” bested “husband” 6 to 2, proving that the Academy isn’t biased against women after all. Or it could be because the majority of winners were men. Hm…
This one actually surprised me: “film” bested “movie” by a count of 22 to 8. I’m not sure when these two terms began taking on different connotations in terms, but it’s clear that the Oscar winners were choosing their words carefully. It’s also quite reflective of the types of mov..er..films that the Academy chose to honor that night.
 Movie. |
 Film. |
 Moviefilm. |
The Great Producer in the Sky, “God,” only received 3 mentions. Two were in the phrase “Oh my God.” The other was in the phrase “God bless us all” from Mo’Nique’s acceptance speech. He wasn’t thanked, not even once.
Snubbed. His agent was on the phone immediately after that speech.
And finally, there was exactly one usage of a word that contained an umlaut (outside of a person’s name). Guess who served that one up:
Yup, Christoph Waltz. That's an "über-bingo."