| 41st Academy Awards | |
|---|---|
| Date | April 14, 1969 |
| Site | Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles |
| Produced by | Gower Champion |
| Directed by | Gower Champion |
| Highlights | |
| Best Picture | Oliver! |
| Most awards | Oliver! (5) |
| Most nominations | Oliver! (11) |
| TV in the United States | |
| Network | ABC |
The 41st Academy Awards were presented on April 14, 1969, the first to be staged at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. For the first time since the 11th Academy Awards, there was no host.
Oliver! is the only Best Picture winner to receive a G-rating prior to winning the award (several earlier Best Picture winners have received this rating retroactively), as well as the last British film to win Best Picture until Chariots of Fire in 1981 and the last movie musical to win until Chicago in 2002.
The year was notable for the first—and so far, only—tie for Best Actress (or any female acting category). Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl shared the award. Hepburn also became the second actress and third performer overall to win an acting Oscar two years in a row, after Luise Rainer in 1936 (The Great Ziegfeld) and 1937 (The Good Earth), and Spencer Tracy in 1937 (Captains Courageous) and 1938 (Boys Town). The previous year, Hepburn had won Best Actress for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
As the special effects director and designer for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick was the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the only Oscar he would ever win.[1]
Cliff Robertson's performance in Charly was met with a generally mixed reception from critics and audiences. When he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, it engendered some controversy: less than two weeks after the ceremony, TIME mentioned the Academy's generalized concerns over "excessive and vulgar solicitation of votes" and said "many members agreed that Robertson's award was based more on promotion than on performance."[2]
Young Americans was announced as the Documentary Feature winner, but on May 7, 1969, the film was disqualified when it was discovered that it had premiered in October 1967, thus making it ineligible for a 1968 award. Journey into Self, the first runner-up, was awarded the Oscar the following day.
Controversy was created on Oscar night when Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett announced in a sketch on the evening's Tonight Show, which was recorded three hours before the awards ceremony, that Oliver! would be the winner for Best Picture and that Jack Albertson would win for Best Supporting Actor. Columnist Frances Drake claimed that most observers believed Carson and Hackett "were playing a huge practical joke or happened to make a lucky guess".[3] As Carson recalled it on the air years later, it created a huge controversy and people at Price Waterhouse were fired. Referring to it as "The Great Carson Hoax", PricewaterhouseCoopers stated in a 2004 press release that it was "later proven that Carson and Hackett made a few lucky guesses for their routine, dispelling rumors of a security breach and keeping the integrity of the balloting process intact".[4] The Academy later hired Carson five times to host the ceremony.
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