Movie musicals go back to the birth of the talkies in 1927, which was also the year of the birth of the Oscars. At the first Oscar ceremony, honoring the movie year 1927/28, the first talkie (The Jazz Singer)earned Warner Bros. an honorary Oscar “for producing the pioneer outstanding talking picture which has revolutionized the industry.”

Musicals had always been popular at the box office and occasionally at the Oscars. In the first decade, 1927/28-1937, there were two, The Broadway Melody and The Great Ziegfeld,which would win awards for Best Picture. In the second decade, 1938-1947, there was only one, the semi-musical Going My Way, and in the third, 1948-1957, again only one, An American in Paris. The fourth decade, however, produced a whopping four musical Best Picture winners, Gigi; West Side Story; My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. When the fifth decade began with a win for yet another musical, Lionel Bart’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ beloved Oliver Twist, re-titled simply Oliver!, it looked like musical Best Picture winners might be recurring with some frequency. We had no way of knowing it would take another 23 years for Chicagoto become the ninth and last musical Best Picture winner to date.

A smash hit in London in 1960, Lionel Bart’s Oliver! was the toast of Broadway in 1963. The film version was nominated for eleven Oscars including Best Director (Carol Reed), Actor (Ron Moody as Fagin) and Supporting Actor (Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger). It won five, including one for Reed, and a sixth Oscar, an honorary one for Oona White’s choreography. Musical director Johnny Green’s daughter Kathe dubbed the singing voice of Mark Lester in the title role of the young orphan who falls in with a gang of pickpockets. Oliver Reed, the director’s nephew, was the menacing Bill Sikes, and Shanni Wallis was the tragic Nancy.

Oliver!’s chief competition at the Oscars, Anthony Harvey’s film of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter also came to the screen via the Broadway stage. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won three for Goldman’s adaptation of his play, for John Barry’s magnificent score and for Katharine Hepburn’s exhilarating performance.

Peter O’Toole won his third nomination as Best Actor, his second as England’s Henry II, a role he first played in 1964’s Becket. Thirty-four at the time of filming to Hepburn’s sixty, the legends from different generations set off sparks as Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine, his estranged Queen, fighting over Henry’s successor. Will it be Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) or John (Nigel Terry)? Add in Timothy Dalton as young King Phillip of Spain and you have one of the great acting ensembles of all time.

Shakespeare’s immortal Romeo and Juliet had been filmed numerous times beginning in 1908, but never with an age appropriate cast until Franco Zeffirelli cast teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in the title roles and surrounded them with young co-stars such as Michael York as Tybalt, John McEnery as Mercutio and Bruce Robinson as Benvolio, put them in costumes by Danilo Donati, in sets designed by Renzo Mongiardino, photographed by Pasquolino De Santis and surrounded them with music scored by Nino Rota. Nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Director, it won for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design.

Paul Newman won the New York Film Critics Award and a Directors Guild nomination for directing his wife, Joanne Woodward, as a frustrated old maid schoolteacher in Rachel, Rachel, but Oscar nominated him only for producing the film, which was nominated for Best Picture. Woodward, also a New York Film Critics Award winner, received a Best Actress nomination as did Stewart Stern for his screenplay and Estelle Parsons for her supporting turn as one of Woodward’s fellow teachers.

The fifth nominee for Best Picture was the film version of another Broadway musical, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s Funny Girl, directed by William Wyler, starring Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice. Nominated for a total of eight Oscars, Streisand was the early favorite to win for her recreating her star-making Broadway turn as the legendary singer-comedienne. She won in a tie with Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine. Also in the cast were Omar Sharif as her gambler husband, Nicky Arnstein, Walter Pidgeon as showman Florenz Ziegfeld and Kay Medford, Oscar nominated for playing Fanny’s mother. Medford’s nomination was widely seen as compensation for her role being cut to ribbons. Blink and you’ll miss her.

Other filma that Oscar liked outside of the Best Picture nominees included 2001: A Space Odyssey; Rosemary’s Baby; The Subject Was Roses; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; The Fixer; Charly; Planet of the Apes; The Shoes of the Fisherman; Isadora; Faces and The Battle of Algiers, but not Belle de Jour.

Stanley Kubrick was nominated for Oscars thirteen times – five for writing, four for directing, three for producing and one for creating special effects. It was in the latter category that he won his only Oscar for the science fiction masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that forty-two year later is still considered one ofbest of the genre. The film, which stared Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and William Daniels as the voice of HAL the computer, was nominated for four Oscars including three for Kubrick (writing (shared with Arthur B. Clarke), directing and special effects) and one for its art direction.

Not since Fredric March won an Oscar for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had a horror film figured into the Oscar race in a big way, but Roman Polanski’s film of Ira Levin’s best-seller, Rosemary’s Baby was too good to ignore. Mia Farrow as the young woman chosen by a cult of Satanists to carry the devil’s child became a full-fledged movie star with this film, but the big discovery, or re-discovery, was 72 year-old playwright and actress Ruth Gordon as the witch next door. On screen off and on since 1915, she won an Oscar and became a frequent presence on screens big and small until her death in 1985 at 88.

The film’s only other nomination was for Polanski’s screenplay.

Veteran character actor Jack Albertson became a star late in life as the miserly father in Frank D. Gilroy’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Subject Was Roses. The film version brought him a much deserved Oscar. Patricia Neal, making her comeback after a series of strokes nearly killed her three years earlier, won a nomination for Best Actress as the over-protective mother and Martin Sheen became a star recreating his Broadway role as their homecoming G.I. son.

Alan Arkin won a Best Actor nomination for his sensitive portrayal of a deaf mute who could bring happiness to everyone around him, but not himself, in Robert Ellis Miller’s film of Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Sondra Locke was also nominated for her lovely debut performance as a sensitive teenager.

One of the busiest actors of the 1960s was Alan Bates who won his only Oscar nomination as the wrongly imprisoned handyman in John Frankensheimer’s film of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, but he, Arkin, Moody and O’Toole all lost to Cliff Robertson as the retarded man who is given an experimental drug that temporarily improves his mind to near genius levels in Charly.

Robertson’s performance may not have been the best of the year, but he was the sentimental favorite for repeating his TV role in Ralph Nelson’s film taken from Daniel Keyes’ popular novel, Flowers for Algernon. Having seen two other TV roles in The Hustler and Days of Wine and Roses go to other actors (Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon) who won Oscar nominations for their work, Robertson was determined not to let this one slip through his fingers and produced the film himself.

John Chambers was given an honorary Oscar for the outstanding make-up he created for Franklin J. Schaffner’s enduring sci-fi classic, Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and Maurice Evans. The film also received two regular nominations.

Generally the first awards group each year, the National Board of Review often sets the pace for the Oscar race, but sometimes goes off in a direction no other group follows. Such was the case this year when Michael Anderson’s film of Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman took top honors. Anticipating the first non-Italian pope in centuries by eleven years, Anthony Quinn plays the Eastern bloc cardinal elevated to the papacy after years of imprisonment in a Soviet gulag. Laurence Olivier as his captor, now the Soviet premier, co-starred. The film ended up with only two minor Oscar nominations.

Art-house fare came under Oscar consideration with several films. John Cassavetes’ talk fest, Faces was nominated for three Oscars for supporting Actor Seymour Cassel, Supporting Actress Lynn Carlin and for Cassavetes’ screenplay. Karel Reisz’s rambling Isadora brought Vanessa Redgave a Best Actress nod and Gillo Pontecorvo earned writing and directing nods for the grim revolutionary drama, The Battle of Algiers, which had been a Best Foreign Film nominee two years before.

The biggest art-house hit of the year was Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour about a frigid Parisian housewife played by Catherine Deneueve who warms up considerably as an expensive call girl. It was perfect for audiences, but apparently too hot for Oscar, which ignored it.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except The Fixer and Isadora.

This week’s new DVD releases include Ben Affleck’s Boston set The Town on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, and the Blu-ray debut of the original 1969 version of True Grit.