The April 1968 presentation of the 40th Annual Academy Awards had to be delayed a week due to the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Fittingly, Oscar’s Best Picture award went to Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, a murder mystery that was also an examination of then still simmering race relations in Mississippi.

Nominated for seven Oscars, and winner of five, In the Heat of the Night provided Sidney Poitier with one of his most iconic roles as the black police detective from Philadelphia who helps a bigoted Southern sheriff solve a brutal murder. Already an Oscar winner, Poitier, despite three high profilefilms this year, failed to secure a nomination for Best Actor. His co-star Rod Steiger was more fortunate. Not only was he nominated, he won for his sympathetic portrayal of the sheriff who finds his humanity during the course of the investigation.

The film also provides strong supporting roles for Lee Grant, Warren Oates, Larry Gates, Beach Richards and Scott Wilson. One of the film’s five Oscars went to editor Hal Ashby who went on to become one of the best directors of the 1970s (Harold and Maude; Bound for Glory; Coming Home).

Though it may have been the right winner at the right time, two other 1967 Best Picture nominees have long since eclipsed In the Heat of the Night in film lovers’ affections.

While younger critics of the day heartily embraced Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, many of the older, established critics didn’t know what to make of it. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther famously panned it, only to re-evaluate it more positively after he was roundly scorned for not “getting” it.

The trend-setting gangster film influenced everything from future gangster films to women’s clothes. It was nominated for ten Oscars including Best Director, Screenplay, and five of its actors, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons. It won for Best Cinematography and Best Supporting Actress (Parsons as Beatty’s sister-in-law and Hackman’s wife).

Nominated for seven Oscars, Mike Nichols’ film of Charles Webb’s The Graduate won only for Nichols’ direction, but its best-selling soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel kept it in the public consciousness long after the film left theatres. Best Actor nominee Dustin Hoffman and Best Supporting Actress nominee Katharine Ross became stars, while Best Actress nominee Anne Bancroft had her most famous role as Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged seductress, though in actuality at 37, Bancroft was only seven years older than Hoffman who looked and played much younger.

It always bothered Bancroft that she was remembered more for this role than for her Oscar winning Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, a much tougher role to play. One wonders what it might have done for Doris Day, who turned the role down.

Spencer Tracy died two weeks after completing his and Katharine Hepburn’s ninth and last film together, Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The comedy-drama about a well-to-do San Francisco socialite (Hepburn’s real-life niece, Katharine Houghton) who announces her engagement to an upstanding black doctor (Sidney Poitier), was already much anticipated, but the fact that it would be the public’s last chance to see the two legendary stars together made it a must-see movie-going event.

It was nominated for ten Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor (Cecil Kellaway) and Supporting Actress (Beah Richards), and won two for William Rose’s screenplay and Hepburn’s performance.

There was uproar over Rose’s win over David Newman and Robert Benton’s screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde, but it was nothing compared to the outrage over Hepburn’s win.

Everyone was happy that Hepburn finally won a second Oscar on her ninth try – it was her tenth nomination over all, but she hadn’t won since her first nomination for 1933’s Morning Glory – but it was widely felt that it was for the wrong film in the wrong year. She was generally considered the weakest of the five nominees.

The fifth nominee was a joke. Fox was once again in financial difficulty and persuaded its employees to vote for their big year end release, Richard Fleischer’s rather disappointing film version of the children’s classic, Doctor Dolittle. The pressure paid off. It was nominated for nine Oscars, all of them but the Best Picture nod coming in technical categories. It won two, for its special effects, and for Leslie Bricusse’s song, “Talk to the Animals”, which was actually quite a catchy tune.

Other films that Oscar liked this year included In Cold Blood; Cool Hand Luke; The Dirty Dozen; The Whisperers; Wait Until Dark; Two for the Road; Barefoot in the Park; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Camelot; The Happiest Millionaire; The Jungle Book; Far From the Madding Crowd and even Valley of the Dolls, but not To Sir, With Love or The Family Way.

Richard Brooks’ film of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was thought to be a surefire nominee for Best Picture until it was upset by Doctor Dolittle. The unsettling film, in which the investigators led by John Forsyth are presented as rather dull, while the killers, played by Scott Wilson and Robert Blake, are treated with compassion despite their horrific crimes, was nominated for four Oscars including two for Brooks for his direction and screenplay. Capote, the first of two films dealing with the writing of Capote’s novel would be a major winner at the 2005 Oscars.

Conjuring up memories of Warner Bros. 1932 classic, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, the studio released the similarly themed Cool Hand Luke,which earned Paul Newman his fourth Oscar nomination for playing a nonconformist prisoner sentenced to a Southern chain gang for a petty crime. Nominated for four Oscars overall, George Kennedy won as Best Supporting Actor for playing prisoner, initially at odds with Newman, who becomes his friend.

Nominated for four Oscars including Best Supporting Actor, John Cassavetes, Robert Aldrich’s gritty World War II drama, The Dirty Dozen won for its Sound Effects.

Dame Edith Evans, at 79, gave us an indelible portrait of old age in Bryan Forbes’ The Whisperers. The subplot about stolen money is a bit forced, but worth sitting through for Evans’ magnificent performance which won every extant award except the Oscar.

In two major films this year, Audrey Hepburn was nominated for her blind woman in peril in Terence Young’s film of Wait Until Dark, but actually gave a better performance as Albert Finney’s wife in Stanley Donen’s bittersweet Two for the Road.

Mildred Natwick, in films for nearly thirty years, had her best role ever as Jane Fonda’s good humored mother in Gene Saks’ film of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, finally winning a long overdue Oscar nomination for her efforts.

Next to Doctor Dolittle, the year’s most overly indulged Oscar nominated film had to have been George Roy Hill’s Thoroughly Modern Millie starring Julie Andrews in the title role. It may have made a nice little movie at 90 minutes or even two hours, but Universal’s plans to release it as a road-sow engagement forced Hill to expand it to 138 minutes, which was really more than the delicate musical comedy take on the 1920s could handle. Nevertheless it was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Supporting Actress, Carol Channing, and won for Original Score.

In the meantime Julie Andrews missed out again on recreating one of her great stage roles for the screen, again thanks to Jack Warner, who cast Vanessa Redgrave as Guenevere in Camelot.

Redgrave was lovely, and she could sing, but nowhere near as perfectly as Andrews. The film did, however, give her the opportunity to meet her Lancelot, Franco Nero, with whom she had a long off-screen relationship, reunited with after many years and married a few years ago when she was 69 and he was 65.

Richard Harris, who replaced Broadway’s Richard Burton, went on to reprise the role of King Arthur in several stage revivals including a return to Broadway. Nominated for five Oscars, it won three for Art Direction, Costume Design and Scoring Adaptation.

The year’s most satisfying musical was Norman Tokar’s The Happiest Millionaire, the last film personally supervised by Walt Disney. With a jaunty score by the Sherman Brothers and an eclectic cast headed by veterans Fred MacMurray, Greer Garson, Gladys Cooper and Geraldine Page and newcomers Tommy Steele, John Davison and Lesley Ann Warren, it should have gotten a few of the nominations that went to the lumbering Doctor Dolittle or Thoroughly Modern Millie, but ended up with only one nomination for Best Costume Design.

Disney’s animated version of Rudyard’s Kipling’s beloved The Jungle Book garnered a nomination for Best Song, “The Bare Necessities”.

John Schlesinger’s beautiful to look at, but rather dully produced, version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was nominated for its score, as was Mark Robson’s excruciating film of Jacqueline Susann’s trashy Valley of the Dolls.

Playing a novice teacher who wins over a class of roughnecks, Sidney Poitier had his biggest box-office hit of the year in To Sir, With Love, but the film failed to be nominated for anything, including its hit title tune.

Veteran British character actress Marjorie Rhodes was an early Oscar favorite for her hilarious, yet poignant, portrayal of the mother of the groom in Roy Boulting’s The Family Way. Alas, Oscar ignored her as well as her lovely little film which is still not on home video in the U.S.

All other films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the blockbuster Inception on both Blu-ray and standard DVD and the Blu-ray releases of a number of films including Lost in Translation.