Before the president launched an unauthorized, unpopular war against Iran, there was another president launching a different unpopular war in the Middle East, 23 years ago.
That time, Michael Moore used his acceptance speech at the 2003 Oscars ceremony to speak out about George W. Bush and the Iraq War—and he opened up about the intense backlash he received for doing so. A mixture of boos and cheers could be heard throughout the speech, which Moore told the New York Times this week.
“We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush,” he said after thanking the Academy for his win.
Concluding his Best Documentary speech, Moore, now 71, proclaimed: “Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. Any time you have the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.”
Moore said that the remarks were delivered spontaneously. What happened after his speech was more intense than the boos from the audience.
The Bowling for Columbine director said that he didn’t write a speech for a potential win, despite calls to him, his agent, and his studio head “feeling him out” to check what he might say on stage.
Moore told the publication that the teleprompter instructed him to get off stage, and described: “After, the stagehands kind of closed in around me and one of them screamed, ‘A--hole!’ right in my eardrum.”
According to the Bernie Sanders supporter, the backlash didn’t stop there. Moore detailed: “When I opened up my suitcase when I got home, there was one of those TSA notices in there. And the entire Oscar was keyed, like a car door. The Academy replated it for me.”
Trump’s war with Iran—which, much like Iraq, has been criticized by the Pope.
For Moore, however, his vandalized Oscar statuette hasn’t stopped him from being an outspoken political activist. The film producer—named as one of TIME’s most influential people of 2005—warned the Democrats against supplying arms to Israel at the end of 2024.
Moore was also named by Luigi Mangione in his alleged manifesto, with the murder suspect praising him for his representation of the “corruption and greed” of health insurance providers.
In response to the shout-out, Moore wrote on Substack: “Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away.”
