The Official Oscars YouTube Page Did Not Post Jonathan Glazer’s Controversial Speech — For Technical Reasons

The acceptance speech delivered by filmmaker Jonathan Glazer at the Oscars on Sunday made waves for various reasons, and some were wondering why the official Oscars YouTube page didn’t post his speech. In this case, as IndieWire found out, the reason wasn’t controversial; it was “technical.”

Glazer, who directed The Zone of Interest, which won for Best International Feature, used his speech to speak out against the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Many took his comments out of context in order to attack him, and some just disagreed with him. But because there was an uproar, it was conspicuous that the speech was not posted to the official YouTube account for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which currently features several other acceptance speeches and highlights from Sunday’s show. The absence of Glazer’s speech led some to believe that the Academy was censoring one of their winners.

But as it turns out, there was a benign explanation to this, as IndieWire reported:

An ABC source tells IndieWire that, as part of the distribution agreement between ABC and AMPAS, ABC has a 30-day window in which it has exclusive clip rights to a pre-determined list of 10 different categories, one of those being International Feature Film. As of this moment, you can find the full speech on ABC’s YouTube page, as well as on ABC.com and Oscar.com.

This was also not the only category left off the Oscars YouTube page:

The other nine speeches that ABC has posted on its channel — but not on the Oscars channel — include Makeup and Hairstyling, Costume Design, Production Design, Film Editing, Live Action Short Film, Documentary Short Film, Cinematography, Documentary Feature, and Sound.

During his acceptance speech, Glazer said: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst… Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims, of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Watch the video above via ABC.