My latest Vanity Fair dispatch is about Cameron’s award season speeches, and how they get him into trouble…
There is one event, more than any other, that sealed the public image of James Cameron, and that is the last five seconds of his 1997 Best Director Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic. In the second of three speeches he would deliver that night, Cameron quoted Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from his film, “I’m the king of the world! Wahooooooo!” and lifted his trophy triumphantly. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face after he gave me the Oscar,” Cameron recalled, when I asked him about the speech for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. “His expression was like ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’” What Cameron had intended as a heartfelt display of his exuberance had come across instead as self-congratulatory, especially to a room that had already seen Titanic collect most of the awards and box office receipts they hoped would go to their own films.
The delicate art of delivering an acceptance speech comes easily to some—Meryl Streep’s flustered gratitude and Robert Downey Jr.’s laconic wit could be how-to tutorials for the 30-second medium. But Cameron, for all his industry stature, has never seemed entirely at home behind a Hollywood awards podium.