Viola Davis’s acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress began with a thank you from the Academy and this observation: “You know, there’s one place where all the people with the most potential gather.”

Break. Some viewers may have felt a bout of nausea. What the fences Is the actress going to perform a sequel to Meryl Streep’s performance at the Golden Globes? The next line will be “this room” to stand up for the president-condemned entertainment industry, to preach truth and inclusion, to spark a new skirmish about whether Hollywood is too selfish?

No. The next line: “One place, and this is a cemetery.”

wow Davis’ speech quickly went viral and received wide acclaim for many reasons, the main one being just good writing. She started with a question and gave an answer that few would have guessed. She used the power of surprise, which was demonstrated in abundance elsewhere at the Oscars.

Viola Davis #Oscar The acceptance speech was AMAZING. Watch here https://t.co/fs8vScFX3b pic.twitter.com/cope2GlkKv

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 27, 2017

The speech also made it clear why Davis deserves an Oscar. She seemed to be heaving with excitement, almost out of breath, and yet her words were clear and her sentences deft. She gestured with the precision of her How to Get Away with Murder Annalize Keating’s character in a lecture on law, but she showed the coarseness of the feelings that Mrs. Miller experienced in double. But it wasn’t a game. And if it was, it was so good that it did not seem so. Which, as Leonardo DiCaprio said from a stage elsewhere in the night, is the definition of a great game.

The most remarkable thing is the content of the speech. As a rule, memorable confessions at the Oscars contain explicit political points, contain gaffes, or mark important milestones. But Davis attracted attention with a simple discussion of art, as well as specific, sincere greetings to colleagues and loved ones.

“People ask me all the time, ‘What stories do you want to tell, Viola?'” she said. “And I say: exhume these bodies, exhume these stories. Stories of people who dreamed big and never realized their dreams, people who fell in love and failed. I became an artist – and thank God I did – because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live.

The resonance with Davis’s work was clear: fences based on a play by August Wilson about a 1950s working-class black family whose members are not known but who simply struggle and argue against the backdrop of society and history. Wilson “exhumed and uplifted the common people,” Davis said; his story was “about people and words and life and forgiveness and grace”.

But it was impossible to miss the resonance with other themes of the night and the era. The Best Picture nomination was full of stories about the culturally invisible and disillusioned: Post-Crisis Texans who were denied opportunities in Hell or high waterlow-level NASA mathematicians, largely forgotten by history in Hidden Figuresorphans and disadvantaged families in India in a lion. In particular, the winner in the nomination “Best Film” Moonlight unfolded the story of a poor black gay man who simply survives, an ordinary life of those that are depicted so rarely that they seem unusual.

So there is politics here, albeit subtle. In the context of conversations about diversity and inclusion at the Oscars and in America in general, Davis’s praise of stories about ordinary people, unfulfilled dreams, necessarily has a political meaning: the depiction of a previously unrepresented struggle means that life is not white, natural, provided. and/or male matter.

The moment was lightly reinforced when she thanked her sisters, remembering, “We were rich white women in the tea party games.“. They played white and rich, perhaps because of what society told them to fantasize about. Davis demonstrated the power of suggesting alternatives.