Category: Academy Awards History

In a move that Producers Guild of America said was “in support of” the Academy’s decision to increase the number of Best Picture nominees to 10, the PGA has done the same. It isn’t hard to see what is really happening. The PGA wants to continue its streak of strong predictive capabilities and jump on…

Early on it seemed as though Nashville would be invincible in the 1975 Oscar race. Right off the bat it tied with Barry Lyndon as co-winner of the National Board of Review award, then went on to win the National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics awards all by its lonesome. The…

1974 was a big year for Paramount. It had the early Oscar favorite, Roman Polanksi’s Chinatown which opened in June, and the year’s most anticipated film, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, which opened at year end. It also had some of the year’s other top films including Sidney Lumet’s all star cast version…

The Exorcist or not The Exorcist was pretty much the way the 1973 Oscars went. The blockbuster horror film was the year’s most anticipated event and the end product did not disappoint, but could a horror film win the Best Picture Oscar? It had never happened before. The National Board of Review snubbed it altogether,…

1972 was always going to be the year of Cabaret, which opened in February, and The Godfather, which opened in March. It’s unusual to have one film, let alone two, that open early in the year which dominate Oscar speculation but this was one such year. The National Board of Review started awards season off…

1971 continued the Oscar trend of nominating two bold, innovative films (A Clockwork Orange; The Last Picture Show), two decidedly old-fashioned entertainments (Fiddler on the Roof; Nicholas and Alexandra) and one somewhere in-between (The French Connection). The New York Film Critics led off awards season with a Best Picture nod to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork…

1970 was somewhat of a replay of 1969 at the Oscars, albeit one with a different outcome. Again there were two critically acclaimed films embraced younger audiences and Academy members (Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces), two by the older crowd (Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton and George Seaton’s Airport) and one squarely…

Oscar said goodbye to the turbulent sixties with a curious batch of Best Picture nominees – the new, bold and daring were represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, the old-fashioned and safe by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the middle-of-the-road by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Now that the Hollywood…

1968 was a year of surprises at the Oscars. Early on, Paul Newman, who had failed to win any of the four times he was nominated for Best Actor looked like he might finally win as Best Director for Rachel, Rachel. He had won the New York Film Critics Award and the Golden Globe and…

The 1967 Oscar ceremony had to be postponed a week due to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Appropriately the winning film was In the Heat of the Night about a black detective from Philadelphia who joins forces with a redneck sheriff to solve a murder in the deep South. The Sidney Poitier-Rod Steiger starrer,…

Stage to screen transfers reached their zenith with the release of 1966’s Oscar front-runners, A Man for All Seasons and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mike Nichols’ film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? led the nominations with 13, while Fred Zinnemann’s film of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons tied…

1965 is remembered as the year of The Sound of Music. It opened in the U.S. in March and quickly became the biggest box-office hit since Gone With the Wind. People, it seems, couldn’t get enough of its wholesome charms, going to see it over and over again. By year’s end was a phenomenon around…

There was very little suspense at the 1964 Oscars. From the day it opened on Broadway in March, 1956, My Fair Lady was a cultural phenomenon. It spawned two best selling cast recordings, the Original Broadway Cast recording in mono  and the 1959 London Cast recording with the same stars, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews,…

Handicapping a ten nomine Best Picture race in 1963 becomes more daunting as the Directors Guild drops its by then traditional long list of semi-finalists and announces only the finalists. The DGA finalists for 1963 were Federico Fellini for 8 ½; Elia Kazan for America America; Ralph Nelson for Lilies of the Field; Tony Richardson…

1962 has to be one of the oddest years in Oscar history in that only two of the five Best Picture nominees and their directors were nominated – Lawrence of Arabia’s David Lean and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Robert Mulligan. But then, they were the two most likely to win anyway. With ten nominations to…