Goldie Hawn really wishes she had gone to receive her Oscar in person
Goldie Hawn was asleep in London when she was announced as the Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower in 1970
These days, being an Oscar nominee is a full-time job of doing press, shaking hands, kissing babies, eating hot wings, etc. It’s hard to imagine after all that work missing out on the pivotal moment when your name might be called on that stage. But back in the day, the Oscars race was less intensive, and if, like Goldie Hawn, you assumed you weren’t going to win, you might not even bother being in the country for your first-ever Oscar-nominated ceremony.
Unfortunately for Hawn, that means she was asleep in London when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower in 1970. “I forgot it was on television that night,” she tells Variety. “Then I woke up to a phone call at like 4 in the morning. And it was a man’s voice and he said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you got it.’ ‘I got what?’ ‘You got the Academy Award for best supporting actress.’”
Hawn proceeded to call her parents and have “a good cry.” She says, “I never got dressed up. I never got to pick up the award. I regret it. It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It would have been so great to be able to have done that.’”
In fact, she never even saw a rerun of the moment she won until frequent Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel showed it to her “a few weeks ago,” according to the outlet. “He said, ‘Did you ever see the part where you’re being announced by Fred Astaire?’ And I said, ‘Fred Astaire?!’ He’s my idol. And I didn’t know he was the one that announced my name,” Hawn shares. “I got emotional when I finally saw it.”
Hawn has since been part of a few other memorable moments in Oscars history, like accepting an award on behalf of another no-show George C. Scott (“I was amused and shocked”) and the infamous bit about getting married when she presented with longtime partner Kurt Russell (they came up with it themselves, and “didn’t tell anybody anything about going off-script”).
The Oscar winner’s issue with the ceremony as it stands today? “It used to be elegant,” she says. “I’m not old-fashioned, but sometimes jokes are off-color. And I’m missing reverence. Things have become politicized. I want to see people in awe. I want to see people believing again. I want to see people laughing more in a way that isn’t just at someone else’s expense.”