Here we are again. After revisiting the Oscars of 1994 for their 25th anniversary, it's time to go further back to the 1969 Oscars, whose ceremony was celebrated 50 years ago today. Unlike the Forrest Gump year, when the Academy Awards were pretty much business as usual, the 1969/70 awards season was part of a transitional period. The tension between the decomposing corpse of the studio system and the brats of New Hollywood was on full show for these Academy Awards. Each victory represents a prickly negotiation between the new and old guards. On one hand, we have the only X-rated movie to ever win Best Picture. On the other, John Wayne is our Best Actor for True Grit.
Speaking of the Duke, there's no better way to understand the singular contradictions of these Oscars than to look at the cowboys of 1969…
First up, there's the big winner of the night, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, the story of a Texan country boy turned New York hustler. The mere existence of this movie was only possible due to the rapidly changing standards and codes of production in the American film industry. Five years earlier, it would have been unthinkable to mount such a spectacle. Accordingly, it's happy to subvert the iconography of the cowboy and unspool the humanity beneath a patina of Americana. This nostalgic phantasmagoria haunts every moment of the film, making its portrait of the seedy underbelly of New York City into something more melancholic than exploitative.
While Midnight Cowboy uses the imagery of the western as raw material for cinematic transgression, there's a good deal of legitimate westerns among its fellow nominees. Even riskier than the Best Picture winner, The Wild Bunch dared to smear blood and dirt in the face of the genre, denuding it of any pretension of civility or saintly heroics. Sam Peckinpah's attack on the institution of American nostalgia was a cruel circus where there's no glory in violence, only horror. Diametrical to those films, there's True Grit which lionizes the heroes of yore and celebrates these decrepit icons with not a single drop of critical self-awareness.
Trying to bridge the gulf between the veterans and the young bucks, there were two 1969 pictures that featured polyamory in the Old West. One of them, Paint Your Wagon is a sorry excuse for a musical, a humorless comedy whose cocktail of pop feminism and old school chauvinism is as foul as it is incoherent. In contrast, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid manages to bridge the divide between generations of filmmakers and moviegoers. It does so by looking at the past through the lenses of hip modernism. Funny and despondent, it's an elegy for a dead genre that smiles tenderly at its open casket.
Maybe if that buddy cowboy adventure had won the night we'd have been spared some of the reactionary takes that welcomed Midnight Cowboy into the Best Picture club. Talking to Playboy magazine about the results of the 42nd Academy Awards, John Wayne said: "Wouldn't you say that the wonderful love of these two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies as a perverse movie?". Unfortunately for us, this kind of curmudgeon grumbling wasn't exclusive to post-show reactions. Just take a look at Bob Hope's opening monologue:
With all of that out of the way, let's start to revisit some actual Oscar presentations, victories, robberies and acceptance speeches. Our first category is…
BEST SOUND
In this contentious climate of Old Hollywood vs New Hollywood, many studios were able to capitalize on the fears of conservative Academy voters. Lavish campaigns were mounted for Hello, Dolly! and Anne of the Thousand Days, conquering them 7 and 10 nods respectively. The latter was the most nominated movie of the year, so expect it to pop up in many bizarre categories like Best Sound. Regarding the Hello, Dolly! win, I think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid deserved the award.
BEST SHORT SUBJECTS – LIVE-ACTION & CARTOONS
Joan Keller Stern's speech serves as a reminder of the generation divide that haunts this entire ceremony. However, I wouldn't characterize her short, The Magic Machines, as a particularly difficult piece of cinema. It's subject, a bohemian artist of kinetic sculpture, might be vaguely exoteric, but the film is prosaic in form and approach. On the subject of cartoons, I'd have voted for the wordless wonders of Walking, but it's easy to understand why the Academy chose the mix of education and hallucination that is Disney's It's Tough to Be a Bird. You can find most of these shorts on YouTube, in case you're interested.
THE SECRETS OF LEGENDARY FILM DIRECTORS
The perceived growing libertinage of mainstream cinema is even a topic of discussion in this segment. By the way, note that, of these masters, only the filmmakers that did English-language movies won a Best Director Oscar. It's only in the past two years that we got to witness non-English-speaking films conquering this trophy – Roma earned Alfonso Cuarón the prize, while Parasite made Bong Joon-ho one of the great upsets of recent memory.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Not only are the nominees bad, John Wayne's presentation is nausea-inducing. Honestly, I don't know what possessed the Academy members who voted for some of these. Maybe they were on drugs, though, even then, I don't comprehend how someone could look at Anne of the Thousand Days and think that its cinematography is worth rewarding. At least, the right picture won.
BEST FILM EDITING
What an inspired victory! To this day, Z is the only non-English-speaking picture to conquer this award.
BEST SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
The presentations on this Oscar night were truly insufferable, cringey and full of bad innuendo. This pair of nominees isn't very inspiring either. Marooned is a dry space adventure, so serious it seems to forget it's supposed to be mainstream entertainment. As for its effects, they're fine but pale in comparison to the cinematic illusions of the previous year's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Krakatoa: East of Java is almost as tedious as Marooned and it doesn't possess half the artistry.
BEST SCORE OF A MUSICAL PICTURE
A delightfully ridiculous presentation trying to inject liveliness into one of the worst line-ups of the year. What a sorry lot of musicals these are. No wonder the genre was dying if these tuneless monstrosities were the cream of the crop. We should also mention that these movies were all flops. Hello Dolly!, despite its awful reputation, only lost 3 million dollars making it the most successful of the nominated bunch.
BEST DOCUMENTARY – FEATURE & SHORT SUBJECT
Rewarding the toothless The Love of Life when In the Year of the Pig's dissection of political history and the Vietnam war is right there feels like a slap in the face. In 1969, the Academy was ready to embrace some risky material, but nothing as inflammatory as Emile de Antonio's masterpiece. As for the Short Subject category, the winner being a wordless collage of archival footage that allows anyone to project their personal beliefs unto the material feels like a logical choice for these Oscars. Weirdly enough, The Magic Machines got nominated for Best Live-Action Short Subject and Best Documentary Short Subject. How often has that happened?
BEST ART DIRECTION
Regardless of any justified misgivings about the merits of Hello, Dolly!, its ginormous sets are difficult to ignore. While my vote might have gone to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, I'm fine with this victory for Gene Kelly's historical flop.
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
I've never watched Gaily, Gaily and cannot comment on the merits of its sartorial choices. That said, the remaining nominees are an honorable set. Irene Sharaff's extravagant designs for Hello, Dolly! are one of the picture's strong suits. Similarly, while Sweet Charity is a bit of a mess, Edith Head's costumes aren't part of the problem. Donfeld, he brought he ghosts of the Great Depression and its sallow glamour to the big screen and did a splendid job. In the end, Anne of a Thousand Days won its only prize for the work of Margarate Furse. She deftly prettified Tudor fashions, adding contemporary touches like some French Hoods that look like they're haute couture headbands from a 1969's Spring collection.
HONORARY ACADEMY AWARD
Hands down, the best speech of the night. Cary Grant managed to honor the past and look at the future with optimism instead of reactionary panic. What a class act!
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
An obvious and deserved victor, though My Night at Maud's is a masterpiece as well. The Rohmer moral tale is available to stream in The Criterion Channel. If you haven't watched it, do so at the earliest opportunity. It's truly one for the ages and the performance of Françoise Fabian is perfectly miraculous.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
As a Mephistopheles of the Great Depression, a master of ceremonies facing a floorshow of human devastation, Gig Young is great and his Oscar is well-deserved. I'd go so far as to say he's one of the best winners in the category's history. Speaking of Oscar history, with his performance in The Reivers, Rupert Cross became the first black man to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. This year was also marked by the first of many nominations for Jack Nicholson.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Best Supporting Actress line-up of 1969 is an odd one, with two of the nominees openly despising the works that got them to Oscar glory. Susannah York might have been appalled at her nomination but hers is a masterful turn, a portrait of torn up glamour, a shattered doll with the eyes of a haunted survivor. I might have given her my vote if not for the work of another disgruntled nominee, Catherine Burns in Last Summer. That film is a rabid thing, a sex-filled nightmare ready to bare its teeth at anyone foolish enough to let their guard down. Burns performance in it is a marvel of raw vulnerability.
Perhaps in reaction to these gut-wrenching offerings, the Academy chose to bestow its prize upon a work of lighter tone. Goldie Hawn won for capitalizing on her inherent cuteness and TV stardom, though she wasn't there to accept the prize.
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE & SONG
Both the soundtrack and original song of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were huge hits. The record went gold in more ways than one. Considering that, it's easy to understand the double victory.
BEST SCREENPLAY – ADAPTED & ORIGINAL
Both these races do a great job at encapsulating the state of cinema in 1969.
Anne of the Thousand Days belongs in the Best Adapted Screenplay line-up, seeing as its complex take on the historical narrative is one of its greatest trump cards. Goodbye, Columbus suffers from some overindulgent direction but the adaptation of Philip Roth's beloved novel is sturdy and topical for the times. As for Z and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? they're both masterpieces. Midnight Cowboy ended up winning, signaling the grander victories that were yet to come.
The Original Screenplay category also had space for international excellence with Visconti's The Damned, a tale of Nazi hedonism that ravishes at the same time it horrifies. Looking back in retrospection, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is almost too 60s to function and Easy Rider was probably THE picture of 1969, even if it wasn't the best one. Between the cruel revisionism of The Wild Bunch and the mournful charms of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it's easy to understand why the Academy went for the latter western.
BEST DIRECTOR
My vote would have gone to Sydney Pollack or Costa-Gavras, but all the nominees did some daring and interesting work, even when the result is as discombobulated as Arthur Penn's folk song adaptation, Alice's Restaurant. Because of that, I don't begrudge Schlesinger his victory. As it happened with many of the night's winners, he was absent and couldn't accept his award in person.
BEST ACTOR
The Screenplay categories may have been a better reflection of the movie year, Best Picture more important and Best Actress more surprising but, by far, the most interesting category of the 42nd Academy Awards as Best Actor. It's also the one with the worst winner of the lot.
Starting with him, John Wayne was celebrating 40 years in the movie business and this Oscar was more of a tribute than a reward for the merits of an individual performance. To this day, it's one of the laziest turns to ever win the trophy and even The Duke himself said that Rooster Coburn was the easiest role of his career. As the dead cherry on top of this putrid sunday of a win, in the days following the Oscars, Wayne received a congratulatory phone call from Richard Nixon.
If Wayne was underlining the constancy of his screen persona, Dustin Hoffman was showing the world that he couldn't be pinned down to just one category. With the consumptive sleaziness of Ratso Rizzo, Hoffman proved to be one of the most elastic performers of his generation, capable of chameleonic transformations that were staggering to behold. As for Jon Voight in the role of the titular Midnight Cowboy, he looks and feels like a profaned icon of Old-school Americana.
Finally, this was a great opportunity this was for rewarding the perennially Oscarless Burton and O'Toole, who both give robust performances. After all, this was O'Toole's fourth time at the rodeo and Burton's sixth. Elizabeth Taylor, at least, tried to secure her husband a nomination but nothing could stop John Wayne.
BEST ACTRESS
Like Hoffman, Jane Fonda marked 1969 with a showcase of versatility, playing against her perceived type of sex-bomb. Indeed, as many actresses did before and after, the daughter of Henry Fonda gained the Academy's respect by deglaming for a role. Of course, her performance isn't a mere feat of cosmetics. In They Shoot Horses. Don't They? Fonda rips open her soul, bearing all its battered glory for the camera, playing someone at the end of the rope, a woman so overcome with despair she no longer feels like a human.
Liza Minnelli was another child of Hollywood royalty trying to ascertain herself outside her famous parent's shadow. As The Sterile Cuckoo's Pookie Adams, she does just that, offering a performance that weaponizes the manic quality of a pixie dream girl and twists it until it gets something ugly and painfully honest. Still, for many years, people assumed Minnelli got the nod out of pity for her mother's death. Even if that was the reason, it's still a great performance.
Jean Simmons is the least impressive of the line-up, but her work can't be said to be undeserving of the recognition. As for Genevieve Bujold, I already wrote a whole piece about the greatness of her performance so I won't be repeating myself. Suffice it to say, she's wonderful as Anne Boleyn.
Maggie Smith's nomination was something of a surprise. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was released in March and, unlike her competitors, she had neither Hollywood pedigree, a History with Oscar or a million-dollar campaign behind her picture. Maybe her good reviews for appearing in the Los Angeles stage during the voting period helped her secure the recognition. No matter how good she is as a delusional teacher or how obvious her win may seem nowadays, this victory was regarded as a huge upset. Maggie Smith wasn't even there that night, as she was busy with rehearsals in London.
BEST PICTURE
After all these contentious races, Best Picture feels almost anti-climactic. In the race of old and new, the future won and Midnight Cowboy was victorious. As for me, I'd have voted for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? which wasn't even among the nominees, despite having conquered nine nods overall. Of the actual contenders, my vote would be for Z, whose American distributors, prompted by some impressive critical reactions, mounted a grand FYC campaign. It worked and the film became the second non-English-language movie to be nominated for Best Picture in the history of the awards. As we all know, it would take 50 years for the Academy to honor a non-English-speaking picture with a victory.
To end this massive retrospective, we have Hope's last words for the Oscar night. It's a paternalistic little speech, a bit sour and a bit frightful, completely humorless. Times were a-changin' in 1970, but not fast enough.