Brow Beat

Pawel Pawlikowski, Hero Polish Director, Outlasts the Oscar Play-off Music

Read all Slate’s coverage of the 2015 Oscars.

Sunday’s Oscar ceremony featured two historic moments. One was Poland’s first Oscar: Ida, the black-and-white movie about a nun traveling through ’60s Europe, won for Best Foreign-Language Film. The second came when Pawel Pawlikowski, the movie’s dapper director, took the stage to accept the award.

Pawlikowski launched into a seemingly never-ending stream of thank-yous, prompting the inevitable swell of play-off music. The director sped up his speech but kept on going, and then … the music stopped. That’s right: Pawel Pawlikowski, hero of our times, went up against the music that dispensed hundreds of directors, actors, and producers before him, and won. The audience erupted in cheers, and several later awardees, inspired by his example, fought the music as well.