19 Feb 2017

Screen Gems: award-show highlights and low points

From Standing Room Only, 2:49 pm on 19 February 2017
Anna Paquin receives her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress

Anna Paquin receives her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress Photo: YouTube screenshot

Irene Gardiner remembers some memorable award-show moments - from the notorious Goftas and the great Miss New Zealand debacle to Anna Paquin's breath-taking Oscar win for The Piano.

The Goftas - New Zealand's 1987 television awards - are now part of pop culture legend. The ceremony began with presenters in bizarre silver space suits and went downhill from there. The crowd was drinking heavily, not eating enough and drunken heckling ensued, most famously when British actor John Inman from Are You Being Served? was presenting an award.

“The show culminated with these massive timing issues. People were getting turned away as they tried to walk to the stage to get their awards!” Irene says.

The Listener Gofta Awards 1987

The 1984 Miss New Zealand awards were presented by consummate professional Peter Sinclair, but somehow he managed to read out the wrong winner...

The Miss New Zealand Show 1984

Anna Paquin’s Oscar moment is legendary - the gulps, the tidy speech that followed and that now long- gone Kiwi accent.

“You like me!” In 1985 Sally Field won her second Academy Award for Places in the Heart and the time Gidget got gushy went down in Oscar history.

Bruce Springsteen paid tribute to Jackson Browne’s sex appeal and the high proportion of beautiful women at his gigs in this Rock N Roll Hall of Fame induction speech - Bruce also lamented the fact that his own audience remained resolutely male.