Day Ten: Best Picture, 1969

I mentioned it in last month's 1968 retrospective - '67 was the announcement of New Hollywood, '68 was the last gasp of Old Hollywood...and '69 is where '67 paid off.

Even Anne of the Thousand Days, a prime example of Royal Melodrama, puts such an emphasis on sex and semen that it could only have been touched by a major studio in this period (well...unless Otto Preminger had his hands on it). Even the Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is a hangout buddy flick with a decidedly non-western score, unorthodox romantic trio, and a fare-thee-well to the genre. Even the standard Liberal Cause Drama is the cynical, French-language, Socialist-sympathizing Z. Only Hello, Dolly! actually stands as a prime example of the Big Studio Musical, albeit with some anarchic twists. And Midnight Cowboy...well, hell, ain't nothing like Midnight Cowboy. Maybe that's why it won:

The nominees, after the jump...

Day Seven: Music, 1969

Music time, folks - a ten-deep one, as we look at the nominees for both Best Score and Best Musical Score.

Naturally, John Williams shows up in both categories, the first of many times he would be double-nominated. He had recently broken-through with his nomination in Best Adaptation and/or Treatment Score (as Best Musical Score was then known) for Valley of the Dolls in 1967. Thus was launched one of the most successful careers in all of show business, the rare composer that's also a household name: 24 Grammys, seven BAFTA Awards, five Oscars, four Golden Globes. His movie themes can be heard in theme parks across the world, and his theme for the NBC Nightly News can be heard, er, nightly.

Let's hear the competition after the jump.

Day Six: Best Actress, 1969

Every single nominee here was a five-for-five transfer from the Golden Globes' Best Actress in a Drama category. That has only happened one other time, in 1995: Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking), Elisabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas), Sharon Stone (Casino), Meryl Streep (The Bridges of Madison County) and Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility). Stone won the Globe, but Sarandon won the Oscar.

If one wants to stretch it a bit, one could also count 1962, in which the Academy's lineup of Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker), Bette Davis (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Katharine Hepburn (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Geraldine Page (Sweet Bird of Youth) and Lee Remick (Days of Wine and Roses) were also all up for the Drama Actress Golden Globe...albeit within an expanded slate of ten nominees. Page won the Globe, Bancroft the Oscar.

And in 1969, Geneviève Bujold won the Globe...while Maggie Smith won the Oscar:

The nominees, after the jump....

Day Five: Best Supporting Actor, 1969

We wrap up this first week with 1969 with a look at Best Supporting Actor:

Fifty years later, one name rings out above all the rest: Jack Nicholson. While he was no newcomer to Hollywood - he made his movie debut 11 years earlier in The Cry Baby Killer and contributed to the screenplay for the Monkees film Head - Easy Rider announced him as a true presence to be reckoned with, a Star for the ages. He may be approaching his tenth year of retirement, but Nicholson still looms large in the industry - my God, I still hear twenty-somethings debate his performance in Batman, get bowled over by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, quote Anger Management.

Also worth mentioning: Rupert Crosse's nomination makes it the first in this category for a black actor. Crosse was an Actor's Studio alum who trained under John Cassavetes and is best known for his work in the director's Shadows...although, sadly, I first knew him as the actor who had to drop out of The Last Detail due to cancer. It would be another 12 years before another black actor  was nominated (Howard Rollins, Ragtime) and another year after that before one would win (Lou Gossett, Jr., An Officer and a Gentleman). Fifty years later, Mahershala Ali stands as the reigning Best Supporting Actor champ, the only black actor to win it twice. Here is the legacy of Rupert Crosse.

Nicholson, Crosse, and the rest of the competition - after the jump...

Day Three: Best Adapted Screenplay, 1969

Just as certain filmmakers come with automatic awards heat to their name (Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan), there are some authors whose work is so well-thought-of, any adaptation is ready for Oscar buzz. Does it always pan out?

Playwright Maxwell Anderson's work inspired many an awards-caliber film, such as Oscar nominees The Bad Seed, Knickerbocker Holiday, and The Private Lives of Elizbeth and Essex, and Oscar winners Joan of Arc and Key Largo. He himself was even Oscar-nominated for one of his many screenwriting contributions - in this case, All Quiet on the Western Front - and was an uncredited contributor to films like Ben-Hur and The Life of a Bengal Lancer.

Filmmakers keep returning to Philip Roth again and again - most recently, Ewan McGregor with American Pastoral and James Schamus with Indignation - yet only Goodbye Columbus has had any success with audiences, critics, and Oscar. The closest anything ever came to duplicating that success? Possibly Elegy, the 2008 adaptation of The Dying Animal starring Ben Kingsley.

The works of James Leo Herlihy had their time in the Hollywood spotlight: 1959's Blue Denim was a Golden Globe nominee while 1962's All Fall Down was a Cannes competitor and National Board of Review winner. Midnight Cowboy was the only film version of his work to make it to the Oscars, and the last significant adaptation of any of his work.

Horace McCoy, like Maxwell Anderson, was known in 1930s Hollywood as a screenwriter, though he originally arrived from Texas to pursue acting. As with his books, he contributed mostly to pulp crime dramas - a genre rarely afforded the respect it deserves. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is, to date, his only brush with Oscar.

It is believed by many - or at least, the authors of Inside Oscar - that Z benefited from a heavy awards campaign, and so we may not be surprised upon hearing that Vasili Vasilikos' other works, while internationally-renowned, rarely inspired cinematic treatments outside his native Greece - though there was a 2012 remake of Z released in India, titled Shanghai.

Their works did inspire nominations at least once - and there they are. The Adapted Screenplay nominees of 1969:

Day Two: Best Actor, 1969

What a difference 50 years makes, huh?

In 1969, all these men were stars, nigh untouchable - the newcomer was Jon Voight, winner of the Most Promising Male Golden Globe. The rest were legends, heartthrobs, cover stars, and even though they each courted their fair share of controversy, their status was unquestionable. Members of the public may object to the politics of one, the treatment of women by another, but we shrugged and said, "That's Hollywood!"

Fast forward 50 years. Voight, who finally won an Oscar for the anti-war film Coming Home, is a divisive figure politically, and while he currently enjoys a regular job on Ray Donovan, it's hard to imagine him being embraced again by the Academy. In 2017, Dustin Hoffman was accused of sexual misconduct by seven different women whose experiences crossed decades. John Wayne, who had plenty of critics during his lifetime, was recently blasted on social media for racist and white supremacist opinions he gave during a 1971 Playboy interview. Richard Burton comes off reasonably well, if mostly best-known for being Mr. Liz Taylor, while Peter O'Toole...actually, I think we're good with Peter O'Toole - I think it helps that both men's main troubles were rooted in their alcoholism, and each sobered up.

The point being, our perceptions of people and the standards to which we hold our stars have changed significantly since The Duke was crowned king - or at least, people are more careful about who they publicly praise. Yesterday's idols are today's unmentionables. That's what I see when I take a look at this lineup: either dead, canceled, or both.

But have the performances held up? Let's take a look!

Coming Attractions: 1969

Starting Monday, we celebrate a LOT of 50th anniversaries with the 1969 Retrospective! The first two weeks take us through the Oscar nominees in eleven categories, followed by a week of talk on other movies, culminating in my personal Top Ten and Retro Hollmann Awards in week four.

Week One: the nominees for Best Original Song, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor, featuring...

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Here It Comes!

Get ready for back-to-back flashbacks on this here blog!

In July: the films of 1968. Two weeks of Oscar nominees, a week of other movies I watched, and then the grand finale - Top Ten, Nominees, two days of Hollmann Awards. Featuring Best Picture nominees:

And in August: the films of 1969! In the same format! Featuring Best Picture nominees:

 

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