The battle lines were drawn at the 1969 Oscars between the Old Guard, represented by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the Young Turks, represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, with the middle-of-the-road Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seen as the likely compromise winner. So much for compromise!

In the end this was really about good movies vs. bad. Midnight Cowboy and Z were good movies, Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! were not, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, while it had its moments, wasn’t really all that good either.

Released in May when adult films could still be summertime box-office hits, the X-rated Midnight Cowboy proved to be an unqualified success. The rating, which was later changed to R, didn’t have the connotations such a rating would have just a few years later. Audiences of the day were intelligent enough to distinguish between a classily made film and pornography.

John Schlesinger’s film from James Leo Herlihy’s novel solidified the reputation of Dustin Hoffman as one of the great actors of his generation. The naïve, clean-cut Benjamin of The Graduate was suddenly the grizzled, old-before-his-time, con artist, Ratzo Rizzo, living off the kindness of strangers. The transformation was startling, the performance flawless. No less so was the performance of Jon Voight as Joe Buck, the Texas stud come to the big city to make it as a male prostitute. Equally impressive was the film’s third star, the seedy de-glamorized New York of Schlesinger’s vision. John Barry’s haunting score also added immeasurably to the look and feel of the film which received seven Oscar nominations and won three for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.

Costa-Gavras’ political thriller, Z, which won the New York Film Critics Award as Best Film of the year was the first foreign language film nominated for Best Picture since 1938’s Grand Illusion. Based on the true story of the cover-up of the assignation of a left-leaning doctor, a beloved former Greek Olympian, the film which starred Yves Montand, Irene Papas and Jean-Louis Trintignant, unfolds as a suspense filled mystery. The director’s pulsating rat-a-tat-tat style is perfectly underscored by Mikis Theodorakis’ music, written under house arrest by the composer, who was a political prisoner of the right-wing Greek government and smuggled out to the director.

Nominated for five Oscars, it won for Best Foreign Film and Best Editing.

The middlebrow Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, directed by George Roy Hill, is remembered as the first film collaboration of Paul Newman and fast rising new star Robert Redford. It is also remembered for the Oscar winning song, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and its iconic “did-they-or-didn’t-they” ending. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won four, which in addition to its win for Best Song, included Best Score, Cinematography and Best Original Screenplay.

A huge stage success, Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! was a film that could have been the career highlight of any number of middle-aged to elderly actresses had they been given the title role, but instead Fox went for the big contemporary name – Barbra Streisand, who, magnificent singing voice aside, was way too young and inexperienced to pull off the role of a middle-aged widowed matchmaker. Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Marianne McAndrew, Tommy Tune and others provided more authenticity of the material, but neither they nor the film itself were helped by Gene Kelly’s tepid direction. Nevertheless the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Art Direction, Sound and Scoring of a Musical.

Universal pulled out all the stops to promote Anne of the Thousand Days, a tired looking film of a 1946 Broadway play that attempted to appeal to the same audiences as Becket and A Man for All Seasons. The problem was that those films were taken from later, more literate and absorbing plays. The simplistic and obvious Anne, which told the same story as A Man for All Seasons from a different perspective, was made about twenty years too late. Its ten nominations included acting nods for Richard Burton as Henry VIII and Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn, but its only win was for its costumes.

Among the films Oscar liked, in addition to its Best Picture nominees, were They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; True Grit; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; The Sterile Cuckoo; Sweet Charity; Alice’s Restaurant; Last Summer; Easy Rider; Cactus Flower; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; The Wild Bunch and The Damned,but not Oh! What a Lovely War; if…. or Medium Cool.

Scoring an impressive nine Oscar nominations, Best Director nominee Sydney Pollack’s depression era drama, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,won a Supporting Actor nod for veteran character actor Gig Young as a repulsive marathon dance emcee. Jane Fonda and Susannah York were nominated for their performances as competitors in the grueling dance competition, and Michael Sarrazin, Red Buttons, Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia turned in memorable performances as other burned out dancers.

John Wayne won the second Oscar nomination and first and only Oscar of his long career as one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in the rousing first film version of Charles Portis’ True Grit, directed by Henry Hathaway. Elmer Bernstein’s score accounted for the film’s only other nomination.

The fifth Best Actor nominee, along with Wayne, Hoffman, Voight and Burton, was Peter O’Toole in the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the original version ofwhich won Robert Donat an Oscar thirty years earlier. Leslie Bricusse’s Oscar nominated score is as lovely as it is lively, as are the performances of Petula Clark as Mrs. Chipping and Sian Phillips as her musical comedy star friend.

The opposite of the beloved Mr. Chips, Maggie Smith’s self-deluded Scottish girls’ school teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed b Ronald Neame,was the surprise winner of the Best Actress Oscar over Horses’ Jane Fonda and The Sterile Cuckoo’s Liza Minnelli. The two second generation stars were widely believed to have canceled each other out, but that theory does not do justice to Smith’s magnificent performance which deserved to win on its own merits.

Heralded as the “best musical of the 70s” before the 60s were even over, Bob Fosse’s film version of the Broadway musical, Sweet Charity was all but forgotten by year’s end, but the Shirley MacLaine starrer did manage to nab three technical nominations.

Restless youth was represented by Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant, based on Arlo Guthrie’s best-selling record, which won the director his third nomination; Frank Perry’s Last Summer, which brought a Supporting Actress nomination to newcomer Catherine Burns as a lonely fat girl who is raped by the boys she admires and Dennis Hopper’s road movie, Easy Rider, which brought a Supporting Actor nomination and instant stardom to Jack Nicholson as a pot smoking lawyer.

Another player who became an instant star this year was Goldie Hawn, who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for Gene Saks’ film of the Broadway hit comedy, Cactus Flower,in which she was part of an unlikely triangle that included Walter Mattahu and Ingrid Bergman.

Hawn’s toughest competition was thought to be Dyan Cannon in Paul Mazursky’s wife-swapping comedy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice with Natalie Wood, Robert Culp and Supporting Actor nominee Elliott Gould as her husband.

Best Original Screenplay nominations went to two of the year’s most controversial films, Sam Peckinpah’s violent western, The Wild Bunch and Luchino Visconti’s operatic look at the rise of Nazi Gemany, The Damned, both of which should have received recognition in other categories. The Wild Bunch was nominated for Jerry Fielding’s score but nothing else, while The Damned couldn’t even muster a nomination for Helmut Berger’s one-of-a-kind portrayal of a corrupt cross-dressing pedophile who winds up seducing his own mother.

At least those two highly acclaimed films ended up with something. Shame on the Academy for ignoring the year’s best musical and best anti-war film, Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War; the year’s best youth-oriental film, Lindsay Anderson’s ode to anarchism, If… and Haskell Wexler’s near-documentary look at the bloody Chicago streets outside the 1968 Democratic Presidential Convention, Medium Cool.

All films mentioned except The Sterile Cuckoo and Last Summer have been released on DVD in the U.S.

The week’s new DVD releases include the teen comedy, Easy A,and the thirty years later sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.