The 87th Academy Awards, held on 22 February 2015 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, are remembered as one of the most openly political Oscar nights in years. Patricia Arquette used her win to demand equal pay for women. John Legend and Common linked their song from Selma to voting rights and mass incarceration. Laura Poitras thanked Edward Snowden from the stage. And Best Picture winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu dedicated his award to his fellow Mexicans and to immigrants in the United States.
Those speeches came on a night already shadowed by controversy, because every one of the 20 acting nominees was white. Below is what each winner said, the background to their words, and how their claims stand up. The independent news programme Democracy Now! put the key moments together the following morning in the video below.
The 2015 Oscars at a glance
Neil Patrick Harris hosted the ceremony for the first time. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) took Best Picture, Best Director for Iñárritu and Best Original Screenplay. Boyhood, Richard Linklater's film shot over twelve years, brought Arquette the award for Best Supporting Actress. Citizenfour won Best Documentary Feature, and "Glory" from Selma won Best Original Song.
The ABC broadcast averaged about 37 million viewers in the United States, down roughly 15% on the previous year and the smallest Oscars audience since 2009. Even so, several of the speeches went on to be shared and argued over far more widely than the show itself.
Patricia Arquette and equal pay for women
Arquette, honoured for playing a struggling single mother in Boyhood, closed her speech with a direct appeal. She reminded the room that women give birth to every taxpayer and citizen, and that women had fought for everyone else's rights. Then came the line that brought Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez to their feet in the audience: "It's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America."
The moment became one of the most discussed of the night. It pushed the gender pay gap, a subject usually confined to policy debates, into the most-watched entertainment broadcast of the year.
John Legend, Common and "Glory"
"Glory" was written for Ava DuVernay's Selma, about the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that helped win the Voting Rights Act. Common and Legend performed it at the ceremony on a set recreating the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where marchers were beaten by state troopers on "Bloody Sunday". The performance drew a standing ovation and visible tears in the audience.
Accepting the award, Common spoke about the bridge as a symbol that had once divided the country and now connected people. Legend began by citing the singer Nina Simone, who believed artists had a duty to reflect their times. He then made the point the film was built around: "Selma is now, because the struggle for justice is right now."
Legend went on to make two factual claims. He said the voting rights won 50 years earlier were being compromised, and that the United States was the most incarcerated country in the world, with more Black men under correctional control than had been enslaved in 1850. He ended by telling people marching to the song that the artists stood with them.
Fact-checking Legend's claims
PolitiFact looked at the speech the next day and concluded that Legend had his facts right. It pointed to an earlier check of the same comparison, which counted Black men in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole, and rated it True.
On incarceration, the United States did have the highest imprisonment rate in the world at the time, at roughly 650 to 700 people per 100,000. The rate has fallen since: the World Prison Brief placed the country sixth in 2023, at about 531 per 100,000.
On voting rights, Legend was referring to the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. By five votes to four, the court struck down the formula in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act that decided which states and counties had to get federal approval before changing voting rules. Section 5 itself was left in place, but without a coverage formula it no longer applies to anyone unless Congress writes a new one.
Laura Poitras, Citizenfour and Edward Snowden
Citizenfour documents the days in June 2013 when Poitras and the journalist Glenn Greenwald met Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room, as he handed over documents revealing the scale of NSA surveillance. Poitras shared the Oscar with her producers Mathilde Bonnefoy, who also edited the film, and Dirk Wilutzky.
On stage, Poitras argued that Snowden's disclosures exposed a threat not only to privacy but to democracy. She warned that when decisions affecting everyone are taken in secret, "we lose our ability to check the powers that control." She thanked Snowden and other whistleblowers for their courage and shared the award with Greenwald and other journalists. Lindsay Mills, Snowden's partner, joined them on stage, having travelled from Russia, where Snowden had been living since 2013.
Host Neil Patrick Harris followed with a pun that swapped "reason" for "treason" to explain Snowden's absence, a joke that split viewers between laughter and groans. The film itself had premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 2014 and was broadcast on HBO the day after the Oscars.
Dana Perry and talking openly about suicide
Not every powerful moment was about national politics. Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, a short documentary about a support line for US military veterans, won Best Documentary Short. Its producer Dana Perry dedicated the award to her son Evan, whom she lost to suicide, and urged people to talk about suicide openly instead of in whispers. It was one of the shortest speeches of the night and one of the most quoted afterwards.
If you or someone you know is struggling, contact a doctor or a local crisis line. In the United States, the Veterans Crisis Line featured in the film can be reached by dialling 988 and pressing 1.
Iñárritu, immigrants and #OscarsSoWhite
The last speech of the night belonged to Iñárritu, accepting Best Picture. He dedicated the award to his fellow Mexicans, expressing the hope that Mexico would build the government its people deserve. He then turned to the latest generation of immigrants in the United States and asked that they be treated with the same dignity and respect as those who came before them and built what he called an immigrant nation.
All of this unfolded against the backdrop of #OscarsSoWhite. When nominations were announced in January 2015, all 20 acting nominees were white, the first time that had happened since 1998, and Selma's director Ava DuVernay and lead actor David Oyelowo were not nominated. The hashtag campaign spread quickly, a congressman wrote to the Academy, and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs said the organisation was committed to diversity. The pressure did not fade: after a second all-white acting slate in 2016, the Academy announced changes to its membership aimed at doubling the number of women and members of colour.
Seen together, the 2015 speeches show how award shows can become a platform for causes that reach far beyond Hollywood: equal pay, voting rights, prison reform, privacy, mental health and immigration. Most of those debates are still very much alive.
Sources: Democracy Now!, 23 February 2015: From Selma to Snowden, Oscar speeches (video and transcript); Wikipedia: 87th Academy Awards; PolitiFact, 23 February 2015: John Legend got his facts right; Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States; Wikipedia: Shelby County v. Holder; Wikipedia: Citizenfour.
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