15 years after getting booed, Michael Moore got a chance to finish his Oscar speech
In 2003, the American public wasn’t quite ready to recognize the idea that George W. Bush was a monster who had thrown the country—and partly the world—into an endless and meaningless war in Iraq, which Michael Moore discovered when he used his acceptance speech for Bowling For Columbine’s Best Documentary Academy Award to speak out against Bush and his habit of promoting fiction as fact. Moore was essentially booed off of the stage by the audience at the Oscars, with the celebrities in attendance evidently unprepared for Moore’s now-famous “tell it like it is!” shtick.
Now, 15 years later, Moore received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards this weekend, and he decided to celebrate the occasion by digging up his full, abandoned acceptance speech from the 2003 Oscars. Moore explained that the event was held just days after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and though his initial requests to cancel the ceremony altogether were ignored, he was at least able to bring all of his fellow documentary nominees onstage before getting “yanked” off. Here’s the full text of Moore’s speech, via IndieWire, with some new asides by Moore in italics:
I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and they are here because they are in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, but we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious President.
That’s when all hell started.
We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.
Now, the cacophony of booing is getting quite loud and I can’t even hear myself.
Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush.