LOS ANGELES — You can forgive George VI, the central figure in The King’s Speech, for painfully picking through his syllables when he steps up to the microphone. Like all stammerers, the guy lived in terror of public speaking.

But don’t we deserve some speechifying for the ages from the Hollywood elite that win Academy Awards on Sunday? They’re paid millions for their creative talents, so why do they often bore the stuffing out of TV audiences with droning thank-you lists?

The problem, said King’s Speech screenwriter David Seidler, expected to win the Oscar for original screenplay, is that if recipients fail to deliver a monotonous litany of thanks, they hurt a lot of feelings in a town of big, fragile egos.

“You’re stuck. If you don’t thank a long list of people, you have a long list of people very upset, and if you do thank a long list of people, you have a billion people out in the audience bored stupid,” Seidler said.

And if he wins? “I’m not quite sure what to do,” he said.

Oscar overseers know what they’d like winners to do, though. They’re making their usual exhortations to nominees that should they win, don’t lull the world to sleep by thanking their agents, managers, hairstylists and latte fetchers. Say something remarkable.

“Leave your list in your pocket,” Oscar producer Bruce Cohen advised contenders at their annual nominees luncheon three weeks before the show. “Nothing is more deadly than a winner reading a list of names.”

“If you are lucky enough to get up there, tell us how you feel about being up there. What is this moment in your life like? Speak from the heart,” said fellow Oscar producer Don Mischer. “When winners pull out a list on a piece of paper, we lose viewers by the hundreds of thousands.”

King’s Speech director Tom Hooper said winners at this Sunday’s Oscars would “do well being coached by Lionel Logue. … He teaches the king a lot about the importance of being relaxed and in the moment. That key idea, which is very central to broadcasting, is: ‘Don’t say it to the millions of people watching, say it as if you are saying it to one person. Say it as if you are saying it to a friend.’ That is his advice to the king, and it remains great broadcasting advice today.”

Being in the moment has resulted in some of the most memorable occasions, good and bad, in Oscar history.

Jack Palance did one-armed push-ups on stage when he won for City Slickers. Adrien Brody won for The Pianist and planted a wet, sloppy kiss on Halle Berry, who presented his award. Roberto Benigni climbed the furniture like a kid on a swing-set and declared he wanted to “make love to everybody” after winning for Life Is Beautiful.

When she won her second Oscar, for Million Dollar Baby, Hilary Swank started off memorably with the line, “I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream,” then lapsed into list mode, thanking sparring partners, cinematographers, editors, her publicist.

Academy president Tom Sherak joked Friday that steps have been taken to prevent list reading: “They have done away with the metal detectors, and they are going to have paper detectors,” he quipped. “So before (winners) come up, they’re going to walk through a scan that will make sure they have no paper in their pockets.”