Updated on 02/23 at 2:30 p.m.: When first-time Academy Award nominee and winner Graham Moore opened up about feeling “weird,” “different, and like he “did not belong,” many assumed the screenwriter and author was alluding to being a then-closeted homosexual. Perhaps it was his deep connection with The Imitation Game’s protagonist Alan Turing, a gay man who ultimately took his own life because he was a gay man living in an extremely homophobic Britain. Moore clarified his speech at the Oscars’ Governors Ball.
“I’m not gay,” Moore told BuzzFeed News, “but I’ve never talked publicly about depression before or any of that, and that was so much of what the movie was about — it was one of the things that drew me to Alan Turing so much.” He continued to expand on the universal feeling of being "other" at times in our lives before touching on another (mostly) universal tendency: practicing your Oscars speech with a shampoo bottle. “It’s the kind of thing that I’ve imagined since I was a teenager,” Moore said, explaining how surreal it was to actually be reciting a story he’d been “imagining in the shower and in front of mirrors.” Luckily for him, all those years of rehearsing paid off in spades. (BuzzFeed)
Original Post Published 02/23 at 12:30 a.m.: When it comes to awards acceptance speeches, a winner can go one of two ways: business talk or extremely personal. Some of the speeches at the 87th Academy Awards have been short, sweet, and insider-y. Others, like Graham Moore's for Adapted Screenplay, speak to a larger, more universal topic.
Moore scored the Oscar for his work on The Imitation Game, the movie that, on the surface, deals with Alan Turing's quest to crack the Nazi enigma code during World War II. The Imitation Game, however, was more than just a war film; it explored Alan Turing's personal trials as a homosexual living in Britain at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime. Turing's story was, for whatever reason, widely unknown to popular culture until Moore's film hit Hollywood. (Turing was posthumously pardoned by the British government for his "crime" in 2013.) So, when Moore won this evening, he used his time in the spotlight to inspire weirdness.
"In this brief time here, what I want to use it to do is to say this," Moore said after receiving his statue from Oprah. "When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird, and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And, now I'm standing here. So, I would like this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she's weird, or she's different, or she feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere. Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird. Stay different. And, then when it's your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."
Be yourself. That was the heart of Moore's speech because, as The Imitation Game's characters repeat throughout the movie, "it's the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine."
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