It’s hard to say how many little Oscar speeches you’ve delivered in your head—and you sure ain’t telling—but it’s a cinch that there are at least a few. Odds are it was for one of the big awards—as long as you’re fantasizing, you may as well aim higher than sound editing in a documentary short. Odds are you’ve pictured at least a few people who snubbed you in high school who would be sitting home gnashing their teeth while they watched your golden moment. And odds are you looked fabulous. Academy Award speeches are the artistic equivalent of  attending your own funeral: an event that’s wholly, utterly, solely about you and one that, for most of us at least, is a metaphysical impossibility. But the exclusivity of the thing doesn’t make it any less of a cultural touchstone and, like State of the Union Addresses and post-game press conferences by Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, one that comes with its own set of tropes and traditions. This year’s awards ceremony will be the 85th since the private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929 at which the films of both 1927 and 1928 were honored. That’s a whole lot of speeches, a whole lot of thank yous and a whole lot of sometimes convincing, sometimes actorly tears. Something with that kind of history deserves a little scholarly attention and finally, Academy Award speeches are getting it, thanks to a study by Rebecca Rolfe, a Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student conducting a research project on human gratitude and how it’s expressed. Gratitude is a hard thing to parse, both because it typically comes so swaddled in the crinoline of manners that all of the life is choked out of it, and because when it does emerge in its genuine form there is rarely a scientist around to see it. (MORE: Oscar Robbery: 10 Controversial Oscar Races) “A real statement of gratitude requires a comparatively deep relationship between the giver and receiver and that’s not possible to replicate in the lab,” Rolfe … Continue reading Science Analyzes the Academy Awards Speech