Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [2]
I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts: we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you! And anytime you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up! Thank you very much.
About halfway through these remarks, all hell broke loose. There were boos, very loud boos, from the upper floors and from backstage. (A few—Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep—tried to cheer me on from their seats, but they were no match.) The producer of the show, Gil Cates, ordered the orchestra to start playing to drown me out. The microphone started to descend into the floor. A giant screen with huge red letters began flashing in front me: “YOUR TIME IS UP!” It was pandemonium, to say the least, and I was whisked off the stage.
A little known fact: the first two words every Oscar winner hears right after you win the Oscar and leave the stage come from two attractive young people in evening wear hired by the Academy to immediately greet you behind the curtain.
So while calamity and chaos raged on in the Kodak, this young woman in her designer gown stood there, unaware of the danger she was in, and said the following word to me: “Champagne?”
And she held out a flute of champagne.
The young man in his smart tuxedo standing next to her then immediately followed up with this: “Breathmint?”
And he held out a breathmint.
Champagne and breathmint are the first two words all Oscar winners hear.
But, lucky me, I got to hear a third.
An angry stagehand came right up to the side of my head, screaming as loud as he could in my ear:
“ASSHOLE!”
Other burly, pissed-off stagehands started toward me. I clutched my Oscar like a weapon, holding it like a sheriff trying to keep back an angry mob, or a lone man trapped and surrounded in the woods, his only hope being the torch he is swinging madly at the approaching vampires.
The ever-alert security backstage saw the rumble that was about to break out, so they quickly took me by the arm and moved me to a safer place. I was shaken, rattled, and, due to the overwhelming negative reaction to my speech, instead of enjoying the moment of a lifetime, I suddenly sunk into a pit of despair. I was convinced I had blown it and let everyone down: my fans, my dad out in the audience, those sitting at home, the Oscar organization, my crew, my wife, Kathleen—anyone who meant anything to me. It felt like at that moment I had ruined their night, that I had tried to make a simple point but had blundered. What I didn’t understand then—what I couldn’t have known, even with a thousand crystal balls—was that it had to start somewhere, someone had to say it, and while I didn’t plan on it being me (I just wanted to meet Diane Lane and Halle Berry!), this night would later be seen as the first small salvo of what would become, over time, a cacophony of anger over the actions of George W. Bush. The boos, in five years’ time, would go the other way, and the nation would set aside its past and elect a man who looked absolutely like no one who was booing me that night.
I understood none of this, though, on March 23, 2003. All I knew was that I had said something that was not supposed to be said. Not at the Oscars, not anywhere. You know what I speak of, fellow Americans. You remember what it was like during that week, that month, that year, when