Award season runs on rehearsed smiles and carefully worded speeches, but every so often the script falls apart in real time. A joke lands wrong, an envelope gets mixed up, or someone’s private feelings spill out in front of a live global audience. What follows are eight moments that Hollywood has spent years trying to move past, some decades old and others still fresh enough to sting.
1. Will Smith’s slap heard around the world
At the 2022 Academy Awards, Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, referencing a possible sequel to G.I. Jane. As Rock was presenting the Oscar for best documentary in 2022, he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith being in a sequel to “G.I. Jane” because of her shaved head, and Pinkett Smith has long been open about her alopecia, so Smith reacted by walking up on stage and slapping Rock across the face. He then returned to his seat and reportedly shouted at Rock to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth.
Smith later apologized on stage while accepting his Best Actor award for King Richard, calling his behavior “unacceptable and inexcusable,” adding that jokes at his expense are part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for him to bear. The Academy responded by banning him from attending any of its events for ten years, and Smith resigned his membership altogether. Chris Rock stayed quiet for months before addressing it in a Netflix special, joking that everybody knows what happened to him and that it still hurts, adding “I got ‘Summertime’ ringing in my ears.”
2. Rob Lowe’s Snow White duet nobody asked for
Long before social media could turn a bad Oscars moment into an instant meme, the 1989 ceremony managed to become a punchline all on its own. Producer Allan Carr decided to open the show without a host, instead staging an eleven minute number featuring an unknown actress dressed as Snow White alongside a young Rob Lowe. The decision to open the show with a bizarre 11-minute medley featuring a star-struck Snow White, a young Lowe, and star-covered dancers who sang and danced along to cheesy music left the audience visibly uncomfortable, with cameras catching stars looking stunned in their seats.
The fallout was immediate and brutal. A letter signed by seventeen of Hollywood’s best talents, including Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, and Gregory Peck, decried the ceremony as an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry. Disney even sued over the unauthorized use of its Snow White character, and producer Allan Carr never worked on another major awards show again. Lowe has since made peace with it publicly, once joking that the anniversary deserved its own candlelight vigil, but for years the number was treated as an off limits topic in interviews.
3. Adrien Brody’s surprise kiss with Halle Berry
When Adrien Brody won Best Actor for The Pianist at the 2003 Oscars, he was so overcome that he pulled presenter Halle Berry in for a passionate, unscripted kiss before he even reached the microphone. It became one of the most replayed moments in Oscar history, equal parts romantic and jarring given Berry had no idea it was coming. At the 2003 Academy Awards, Adrien Brody was so happy to win the trophy for Best Actor for his role in The Pianist that he laid a big smooch on presenter Halle Berry’s lips, and in 2017, Berry confirmed to Andy Cohen that “No, it was not planned.”
Brody has occasionally brought it up with a laugh in later interviews, framing it as a spur of the moment reaction to the shock of winning. Berry, for her part, has been gracious about it publicly but rarely dwells on the details, which has kept the moment somewhat mysterious despite being one of the most watched clips from that era of the ceremony. It remains a strange footnote precisely because nobody involved seems eager to relive it frame by frame.
4. The La La Land and Moonlight envelope mix up
Few moments in awards show history match the sheer confusion of the 2017 Best Picture announcement. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope, leading them to announce La La Land as the winner. As La La Land’s production staff and actors took the stage to give congratulatory speeches, producer Jordan Horowitz cleared the air, saying there had been a mistake and that Moonlight had actually won Best Picture, insisting “this is not a joke.”
Beatty later explained what happened, saying he had opened an envelope that read Emma Stone for La La Land, which is why he hesitated on stage. He told the audience he wanted to explain, and that the envelope said “Emma Stone, La La Land,” which is why he took such a long look at Faye and at Jimmy Kimmel, adding “I wasn’t trying to be funny.” The cast and crew of both films handled it with visible grace once the confusion cleared, but the sheer awkwardness of watching a Best Picture win get taken away mid speech is still cited as one of the strangest live television moments the Oscars have ever produced.
5. Brie Larson’s silent moment with Casey Affleck
Handing out an Oscar is usually a warm, celebratory task, but Brie Larson’s presentation of the Best Actor award to Casey Affleck at the 2017 ceremony told a different story entirely. Her response was muted, and she refused to clap for the actor, and as they walked away together she did not embrace or congratulate him, with the two instead sort of skulking off stage. The tension was widely noticed in real time, since Larson had been an outspoken advocate for survivors of sexual assault.
Affleck had faced settled civil lawsuits from two women years earlier alleging inappropriate behavior on a film set, allegations that resurfaced heavily during that awards season. Neither Larson nor Affleck has ever addressed the moment directly or explained the exchange in detail, and interviewers rarely push the subject given how sensitive the underlying issue remains. The silence on stage effectively became the story, saying more than any acceptance speech could have.
6. Marlon Brando’s stand in at the podium
In 1973, Marlon Brando won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Godfather, a role that reignited a career many had considered finished. Instead of accepting the honor himself, Brando refused to accept the award and instead had Native American actress and advocate Sacheen Littlefeather attend the ceremony for him. Littlefeather explained on stage that Brando could not accept the award because of the film industry’s treatment of Native Americans, a statement that drew both applause and open hostility from parts of the audience.
The moment was groundbreaking for using a major stage to spotlight a political cause, but it also came at a real cost to Littlefeather, who described facing backlash and being blacklisted from future acting work for years afterward. Brando rarely discussed the incident publicly in detail during his lifetime, and the Academy did not formally apologize to Littlefeather until decades later, in 2022, shortly before her death. It remains one of the earliest examples of an awards show becoming a stage for protest rather than celebration, and one that Hollywood took a long time to fully reckon with.
7. Jimmy Kimmel’s uncomfortable Oscars jabs
Hosting the Oscars means walking a fine line between roasting the room and alienating it, and at the 2024 ceremony Jimmy Kimmel occasionally crossed that line. Referencing Emma Stone’s explicit scenes in Poor Things during a Best Picture montage, he joked that those were all the parts allowed to be shown on TV, which made the actress shake her head and seemingly mouth “What a prick.”
Robert Downey Jr. had his own uncomfortable moment when Kimmel brought up his history with substance abuse mid ceremony. Kimmel said it was the highest point of Downey’s long and illustrious career, adding “well, one of the highest points,” to which the Iron Man star simply replied, “Let’s move on.” Neither actor has revisited the exchange much since, and Kimmel himself has generally shrugged it off as part of the job description for hosting a room full of nominees who cannot exactly walk out.
8. Pedro Pascal’s drunk SAG speech and the Kieran Culkin standoff
At the 2024 SAG Awards, Pedro Pascal won Best Male Actor in a Drama Series for The Last of Us, beating out his real life friend and playful rival Kieran Culkin. Pascal admitted on stage that the win felt wrong for so many reasons, saying “I’m a little drunk, I thought I could get drunk,” before adding that he was making a fool of himself but was still thankful. He then abruptly ended the speech by announcing he was about to have a panic attack and needed to leave the stage.
Backstage, the awkwardness continued when Pascal joked to Queer Eye’s Tan France about his plans for the afterparty involving Culkin. Culkin later addressed it during a separate interview, saying “He also did ask if I wanted to smell his pits – that was weird.” The two actors have since laughed the whole exchange off as part of a lighthearted awards season rivalry, but Pascal has admitted he barely remembers what he said on stage that night, which has made it a moment he tends to let others describe rather than revisit himself.
Looking back at the cringe
