The Oscars: Years to remember - and to forget
What makes a good year at the Oscars? Great films? Yes and no – what really counts is the talk. That probably makes this year's Academy Awards, the 83rd ceremony, a good upper-middling vintage. You may not care for the two most prominent titles in contention, The King's Speech and Black Swan – personally, I can take them or leave them – but everyone you know has a strong opinion about them. Passions run equally high over Inception and Winter's Bone. You can't imagine that anyone ever got into fist fights over bygone contenders such as Terms of Endearment or Out of Africa.
But what makes an awards year eligible for the all-time annals? When was Oscar at his sleekest and shiniest, and when did the gold turn to a dull bronze? Here are some of the academy's unforgettable years, as well as a few to forget.
1940
When we think of Hollywood in its glory days, we're probably thinking of a year like the 12th Academy Awards. The Best Picture and the overall barnstormer – with eight awards and nominations in 13 categories – was Gone with the Wind. It also won Best Director for Victor Fleming, and Best Actress for Vivien Leigh – although Clark Gable lost out as Best Actor to Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr Chips.
GWTW set the template for the kind of prestige leviathan you expect to triumph at the awards, but look at the nominated films it beat: among them, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights and The Wizard of Oz, among others. Acting nominees that year included Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, James Stewart and Laurence Olivier. But the night (and history) really belonged to Best Supporting Actress Hattie McDaniel, whose Mammy in GWTW made her the first African-American to win an Oscar, even though the role itself hardly struck a blow for black representation.
1951
Some years have the great and the good, and the obscure too, as awards are won by names well known in their day, but now remembered only by the historians – a moment of respect, please, for Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter, Katina Paxinou. Other years, on the other hand, simply throb with deathless celebrity cachet, and one of the foremost has to be 1951. Try this roll call: Bogart, Brando, Clift, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn, Shelley Winters, Peter Ustinov... and let's not forget hard-boiled Hollywood dame Thelma Ritter, a Best Supporting Actress nominee. The big films included The African Queen (Best Actor for Bogart), A Streetcar Named Desire (Best Actress: Leigh), A Place in the Sun, Death of a Salesman and that year's all-singing, all-dancing Best Picture, Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris. And, just to prove there are second acts in American lives, in 1951 Gig Young (in the now-forgotten Come Fill the Cup) lost out to Karl Malden as Best Supporting Actor – but returned to win the prize 18 years later for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
1968
The 40th was an eminently serious year for Hollywood – it marked (temporarily) the end of the age of studio super-productions and gave credibility to a generation of names, the 1960s hipsters. One such was Mike Nichols, former comedy celebrity, who came of age as a director with that year's zeitgeist-defining neurotic-youth statement The Graduate. The other epoch-making film was Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, with leads Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty both nominated.
In fact, it was the old guard that walked off with awards – Best Film was In the Heat of the Night, with Rod Steiger as Best Actor, while Best Actress was Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. But it's remarkable that another lead in both Heat and Dinner, Sidney Poitier, had no nominations that year, given both films' racial themes; and remember, this was the year that the Oscars ceremony – originally scheduled for 8 April 1968 – was postponed for two days because of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
1976
Sweeping the board in the 48th Awards was Best Picture One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which also won acting awards for Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, plus Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director (Milos Forman), and a Best Support nomination for Brad Dourif. Other films running were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws and Nashville – while acting talent included Al Pacino, Walter Matthau, Isabelle Adjani, Lily Tomlin and Glenda Jackson. The other Best Director nominees were Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and Federico Fellini – I mean, how blue-chip do you want? There was also a popular choice of Best Supporting Actor for George Burns - then, at 80, the oldest acting winner yet. The 48th year was one of those when it just felt as if the Academy had its head screwed on and was getting it right – and that Hollywood was too.
The following year, of course, it all went pear-shaped again when Rocky beat Taxi Driver as Best Picture. It happens sometimes – as in 1944, when Going My Way beat Double Indemnity, or two years earlier, when Citizen Kane missed out to How Green Was My Valley. But then, not everyone had quite realised that it was Citizen Kane yet.
1992
This was an encouragingly tough year, with The Silence of the Lambs winning Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was a surprise to see something this dark and confrontational feted by the Academy, but it was a salutary change. After all, the previous Best Picture was the forgettably earnest Dances with Wolves while Best Director was Kevin Costner, whose auteur-dom hasn't exactly resounded through the ages. Other key titles were Thelma and Louise, Oliver Stone's aggressively contentious JFK and John Singleton's ghetto drama Boyz n the Hood. This 64th ceremony effectively marked the end of Oscar's Beige Period, running through the 1980s, when the ceremonies were dominated by drab, middlebrow prestige pictures: from Kramer vs Kramer in 1979, to 1989's Driving Miss Daisy, by way of Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Out of Africa, and Robert Redford's Ordinary People (which beat Raging Bull as Best Picture in 1980).
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