Kieran Culkin's Oscar Speech Is One Of The Best We've Ever Seen

If a movie snagging an Oscars nomination is all about timing, then that goes double for an actor walking away with the best speech of the night. It would've been one of the night's most unbelievable feel-good moments if Best Supporting Actor winner Kieran Culkin had simply been rewarded for delivering one of the most breathtaking and complex performances of 2024. In typical fashion, however, he went even further and walked away with what's certain to go down as the funniest, most emotional, and truly heartfelt words in recent memory. It takes a special personality to express genuine admiration of the celebrity handing him the ultimate prize (a similarly grand appearance by Robert Downey Jr.), inadvertently drop an F-bomb that forces the network to mute his mic for several seconds, and go on to express his gratitude after admitting that his entire prepared monologue flew right out of his head on the biggest possible stage.

That's Kieran Culkin's performance in "A Real Pain" in a nutshell, folks. The brilliant film from writer/director Jesse Eisenberg might ostensibly have been focused primarily on Eisenberg's character of straight man/sad sack David Kaplan, visiting his ancestral home of Poland and embarking on a Holocaust tour for a personal journey long in the making. But it was Culkin's ball of chaos Benji, David's unpredictable cousin, who stole every single scene and sucked up all the oxygen for himself ... and, somehow, won over hearts and minds everywhere he went. In case anyone harbored any remaining doubts as to whether he deserved the win over an absolutely stacked field, well, the actor's unparalleled talents were fully on display with his speech. And we loved every second of it.

Of all the underdog wins of any Oscars ceremony, Kieran Culkin's stands out as one of the most heart-on-its-sleeve moments in an environment where that can be somewhat difficult to find. After fanboying out over Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation, heaping praise on his "Succession" co-star and fellow Best Supporting Actor contender Jeremy Strong, and, yes, dropping that delightful F-bomb in the process, the actor went on to defy the Academy Awards producers and practically dare them to play him off the stage. But his reasons for doing so, coming so soon on the heels of host Conan O'Brien self-deprecatingly performing that "I Won't Waste Time" song, couldn't have been more endearing.

In as brilliant an off-the-cuff moment as any in the last several Academy Awards, Culkin launched into a hilarious and meaningful story about his wife, Jazz Charton. Referencing a prior speech he gave last year about wanting to have a third child with her, Culkin went on to detail a story about how he followed that up with her in a private moment about actually wanting a fourth and her agreeing ... but only if he went on to win an Oscar. Fast forward to 2025 and, well, that's exactly what happened. Dropping the line of the night ("Love of my life, ye of little faith"), Culkin essentially called out his wife in the loveliest and most wholesome way to encourage her to make good on her promise.

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of genuine and very public acts of love we simply can't get enough of amid the pomp and circumstance of the Academy Awards. Culkin's win for "A Real Pain" was already a fait accompli for anyone who watched the movie and came away singing his praises. But his incredible speech on the biggest night of the year was the real surprise, after all.