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Stars Who Completely Embarrassed Themselves At Award Shows

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Some of the biggest names in Hollywood have turned award season into a highlight reel of unforgettable cringe.

Acceptance speeches and live introductions are unscripted minefields, and over four decades of Grammys, Oscars, Emmys and VMAs, more than a few A-listers have wandered straight into one. Nicki Swift’s rundown of the genre’s worst offenders spans a rambling Golden Globes speech, a slurred introduction on live network TV, and an 11-minute musical number that critics still bring up decades later.

• Tom Hiddleston’s 2017 Golden Globes speech for The Night Manager, in which he described humanitarian workers in South Sudan bingeing his show, drew accusations of white saviorism and forced a public apology.
• At the 2004 American Music Awards, a visibly impaired Anna Nicole Smith raised her arms while introducing Kanye West and asked the audience, “Do you like my body?”
• The 61st Academy Awards in 1989 opened with an 11-minute Rob Lowe/Eileen Bowman musical number as Snow White that became one of the most panned openings in Oscars history.

The Speech That Backfired

Tom Hiddleston walked away with the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series for The Night Manager at the 74th ceremony in January 2017. Instead of a clean thank-you, he launched into an anecdote about aid workers in South Sudan supposedly watching his show to unwind after difficult days in the field. The framing struck viewers as self-congratulatory, and the backlash was swift enough that Hiddleston issued a public apology in the days that followed, a rare instance of an award-show speech generating its own separate news cycle.

Fiona Apple went the opposite direction two decades earlier, and got raked over the coals for candor rather than self-regard. Accepting Best New Artist at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, she skipped the thank-yous almost entirely and told the room and the cameras that “this world is bullshit,” urging young viewers not to model their lives on what they saw from celebrities. It remains one of the most quoted refusals of showbiz decorum ever handed a live mic.

Slurred Words and Unfiltered Moments

Live television has a way of exposing exactly what a presenter shouldn’t say, and Anna Nicole Smith’s turn at the 2004 American Music Awards is the textbook case. Tasked with introducing Kanye West, she slurred her way through the introduction and, mid-sentence, raised her arms and asked the crowd, “Do you like my body?” The moment aired unedited to a national broadcast audience and instantly became one of the most replayed clips in AMAs history.

“Do you like my body?”

Ol’ Dirty Bastard pulled off a stunt of his own at the 1998 Grammy Awards, storming the stage while Shawn Colvin was accepting her award to declare that “Wu-Tang is for the children” before security ushered him off. It’s the kind of interruption that award-show producers still plan camera cuts around.

Reaction Shots and Musical Missteps

Not every embarrassment came from the podium. During David Harbour’s 2017 SAG Awards speech for Stranger Things, cameras caught Winona Ryder cycling through a series of wildly shifting facial expressions that became a meme almost before the ceremony ended. Ann Reinking had her own unscripted moment at the 1997 Academy Awards, delivering a vocal tribute so breathless that it drew as much attention as the number itself.

The 60th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2008 handed hosting duties to a rotating cast of reality-TV personalities, whose joke-light opening monologue was widely panned as one of the weakest in Emmys history. A decade earlier, the 61st Academy Awards had already set a low bar with its infamous opener: Rob Lowe and Eileen Bowman performing an 11-minute, campy musical sequence as Snow White that critics and Academy members alike have cited for years as the moment the Oscars needed a format rethink. Milton Berle’s stilted back-and-forth with RuPaul at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards rounds out the list, an exchange that aged into a cautionary tale about mismatched presenters.

Award-show mishaps tend to travel the same circuit as other viral, caught-on-camera embarrassments — the kind of thing covered in pieces like performers caught lip syncing on live TV or inappropriate things politicians said on live TV, where a single unscripted second outlives the rest of the broadcast entirely.

Whatever gets scripted for next year’s Golden Globes or Grammys monologue, producers will still be building in the safety margin these nine moments created — the extra beat before cutting to a reaction shot, the backup plan for a presenter who wanders off-script. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s stage rush alone reportedly got written into Grammy security briefings for years afterward.