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10 Award Show Moments That Will Go Down In History

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Some award show moments never fade — they just keep getting replayed.

Every awards season promises the same thing: red carpets, speeches, and the small chance that something completely unscripted will happen in front of a live global audience. TheThings Celebrity’s countdown, “10 Award Show Moments That Will Go Down In History,” rounds up the incidents that actually delivered on that promise — the selfies, stumbles, interruptions, and confessions that outlasted the shows themselves. These aren’t just clips people remember; several of them changed how the internet works or how audiences talk about the industry.

• Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie at the 2014 Academy Awards became the most retweeted post in Twitter’s history.
• Kanye West took the microphone from Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to declare that Beyoncé deserved Best Female Video.
• Jodie Foster used her 2013 Golden Globes Cecil B. DeMille Award speech to publicly acknowledge her sexuality, decades after Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his 1973 Oscar in protest of Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.

The Selfie That Broke Twitter

Ellen DeGeneres didn’t plan to make internet history when she pulled Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence, and a handful of others into frame during the 2014 Oscars broadcast. The photo went out from her own account mid-show and was retweeted so fast it reportedly strained Twitter’s servers, eventually overtaking the previous record and becoming the most retweeted tweet ever at that point. It’s the rare award show moment that was staged as a bit and still ended up being genuinely bigger than the ceremony around it.

Jennifer Lawrence supplied her own instant classic the year before. Climbing the stairs to accept her Best Actress Oscar for “Silver Linings Playbook” in 2013, she tripped over her gown in front of the entire room. She got up, got her statue, and told the crowd the standing ovation she received was clearly “because I fell and you feel bad for me.” It’s the kind of line that turns an embarrassing stumble into one of the more beloved Oscar moments on record.

Loss of Public Speaking Platforms

No award show clip gets replayed more than what happened at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Taylor Swift had just started her acceptance speech for Best Female Video when Kanye West walked onstage, took the microphone, and told the audience that “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” The reaction was instant and largely hostile toward West, and the moment has stayed in circulation ever since as shorthand for an award show going completely off the rails — a dynamic covered in depth in pieces on celebrity feuds that started out friendly and turned sour.

“Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”

Speeches and performances have produced their own share of chaos beyond microphone grabs. Beyoncé herself supplied one of the more joyful surprises in VMA history at the 2011 show, unbuttoning her blazer onstage to reveal she was pregnant with Blue Ivy Carter — a reveal that turned an already-charged awards night into a viral celebration. Madonna, on the other hand, has landed on best-of lists for very different reasons: her three-way kiss with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 VMAs shocked censors and audiences alike, while her 2015 BRIT Awards performance ended with her tumbling down a flight of stairs after her cape failed to detach properly — a malfunction, not a stunt.

Speeches That Went Beyond the Script

Not every unforgettable moment came from a wardrobe mishap or a stolen mic. Some of the most consequential instances on this list happened because a star used the stage for something bigger than an acceptance speech. Marlon Brando refused to appear at the 1973 Oscars at all, sending actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his Best Actor award for “The Godfather” on his behalf and read a statement protesting Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans — a moment that drew boos from parts of the audience but is now studied as one of the most politically significant Oscar nights ever broadcast.

Forty years later, Jodie Foster used her platform at the 2013 Golden Globes to different effect. Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she used her speech to publicly acknowledge her sexuality in front of the industry and a national audience, delivering it with the same directness that made her Brando’s spiritual successor onstage that night. In between, Adrien Brody added a lighter jolt of unscripted drama at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003, planting an unexpected kiss on presenter Halle Berry immediately after winning Best Actor — a moment that’s been replayed almost as much for Berry’s stunned reaction as for the win itself. Award season regulars looking for more of these live-broadcast surprises can find a related rundown in performers who got caught lip syncing on live TV.

What ties all ten moments together isn’t scandal or spectacle for its own sake — it’s that every one of them happened in real time, with no retake and no edit, in front of an audience that had no idea what was coming. That’s still the only reason anyone tunes into an awards show live instead of just reading the winners list the next morning.