Awesome / Life Is Beautiful

• Guido crashing Dora's wedding on the back of a horse that has been painted green and daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti before sweeping Dora onto the horse, trotting off and knocking an ostrich egg onto the head of the jilted groom.
  • Guido's sheer gall in courting Dora. Orchestrating the events of their date to look serendipitous, picking her up in her fiance's car and driving off with her long before she realises, stealing a government inspector's sash to get into her workplace just to ask her to the opera.
• Dora boarding the train bound for the concentration camp because Guido and Giosué are on it, despite the officer telling her to go home. This woman didn't just willingly walk into hell to be with her family, she demanded to be let in.
• Guido improvising his 'translation' of the German guard's instructions.
• The tank.
• In making this film, Roberto Benigni pulled off an artistic challenge that Charlie Chaplin would not have dared and Jerry Lewis chickened out of doing. Namely, he created a sensitive comedy about The Holocaust and for his efforts, he won three Academy Awards for it.
  • His acceptance speech for Best Actor at the 1998 Academy Awards:
  Benigni: Thank you! This is a terrible mistake because I used up all my English. I don't know! I am not able to express all my gratitude, because now, my body is in tumult because it is a colossal moment of joy so everything is really in a way that I cannot express. I would like to be Jupiter! And kidnap everybody and lie down in the firmament making love to everybody, because I don't know how to express. It's a question of love. You are really — this is a mountain of snow, so delicate, the suavity and the kindness, it is something I cannot forget, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you for the Academy Awards for the, who really loved the movie. Thank you to all in Italy, for the Italian cinema, grazie al Italia who made me. I am really, I owe to them all my, if I did something good. So grazie al Italia e grazie al America, land of the lot of things here. Thank you very much. And I hope, really I don't deserve this, but I hope to win some other Oscars! Thank you! Thank you very much! Thank you!