Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Sylvester Stallone “felt sad” when Rocky won Best Picture at the 1977 Academy Awards ceremony.
The 80-year-old star’s legendary boxing movie took home the biggest prize at Hollywood’s most famous awards bash – seeing off competition from movies such as Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men – but he admits that the he didn’t feel the elation he expected from the victory as his family weren’t there to celebrate the success with him.
Stallone told CBS Sunday Morning: “I’m sitting there, I go, ‘There’s no way we’re gonna win.’ I even had people, believe it or not, other competitive writers, come up to me and go, ‘You’re not gonna win.’ Flat out.”
The Rambo star confessed that he thought it was a “joke” when Jack Nicholson read out the Rocky had won.
He recalled: “I’m hearing things. What’s that buzzing sound?
“And then the applause went and… I wanted to like sink into the seat. And I really did.
“It wasn’t as though I felt elation. I actually felt sad a little bit, because I wanted it to be a festive thing, family thing… like, ‘Okay! We arrived.’ And it was like, ‘Nah’.”
Sly added: “Then I caught on, then I realised that the only love I’m ever gonna really feel at that point in my life is the love of people that are in the dark. You know what I mean?”
Stallone’s parents did not attend the Academy Awards ceremony with him and the movie legend revealed last year that it is something he will never get over.
He told Gayle King for CBS Mornings in December 2025: “It’s a volcanic moment, and then it was very sad. You want people that you love that denied you; now you’re here, you’re at the Oscars, and they don’t want to go…You realise that, at that moment, that you’re never ever going to come to terms with this…”
The Demolition Man star added: “It’s a real learning lesson, Gayle, that parents should really wise up. Kids are the same as soft clay. They really are. You mould them, and you dent them, and you hurt them, or you drop them off the table, and they’re not the same shape anymore.
“I still walk around with it. And I wish I couldn’t. And I pray, and I do everything, but it’s always there.”
Stallone’s attempts to bring the character of Rocky Balboa to the big screen have been immortalised in the upcoming biopic I Play Rocky – in which he will be portrayed by Anthony Ippolito – and the Cliffhanger star has “mixed” feelings about the flick because he’s “not dead yet”.
Responding to an interviewer asking what he thought of I Play Rocky, Sly said: “Kind of mixed because I’m going, ‘I’m not dead yet. Aren’t we jumping the gun a little bit?'”
However, when he saw a clip of Ippolito in character as him, Sylvester was left stunned by the incredible likeness.
He added: “I actually thought it was me the first moment; there were a couple of angles. I go to my daughter and say, ‘That’s unbelievable.'”
