1968: The Most Racially-Charged Oscars Ever?

With the #OscarsSoWhite controversy at the top of the agenda, we look back at the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony, broadcast six days after the death of Martin Luther King and featuring nominations for race-focused films like ‘In The Heat of the Night’ and ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’.

It wasn’t until the announcement of the Best Actor award towards the end of 10 April that the 1968 Oscars properly acknowledged the tension that had been emanating round the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium all night.

Rod Steiger (above), who won the prize for playing a bigoted Southern cop thrown together with a black detective to solve a murder in drama ‘In the Heat of the Night’, finished his speech with a stirring statement using pointed vocabulary normally associated with the civil rights movement.

“I would like to thank Mr Sidney Poitier for the pleasure of his friendship,” he said, “which gave me the knowledge and understanding of prejudice in order to enhance this performance. Thank you and we shall overcome.”

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Right then, the world felt like a dangerous place. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on 4 April and a storm was brewing in Paris which would see riots a month later.

As for the Academy Awards? They were at a crossroads. Never seen as particularly forward-thinking, a large swathe of the 1968 nominees finally seemed to reflect the seismic popular and political changes taking hold across America.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’, Warren Beatty’s bloody homage to the French New Wave was up for Best Picture, alongside ‘The Graduate’ and ‘In The Heat of the Night’, also starring Sidney Poitier. Even the more old-fashioned entry – comedy ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ (above) with stalwarts Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy – was about an interracial relationship, again featuring Poitier. The only anomaly was ‘Doctor Dolittle’, a cheesy big-budget flop that had somehow finagled its way onto the list.

There was a definite anti-establishment sentiment going round town as well. Filmmakers like Mike Nichols and Warren Beatty were challenging the studio orthodoxy, thumbing their noses at their elders who they perceived to be old-fashioned and out of touch. Nominee Dustin Hoffman was a theatre actor considered too odd-looking to be a leading man until he blew everyone away as Benjamin Braddock, forever altering what was expected of a cinematic protagonist.

Meanwhile, the nominations themselves were not without their racial controversy. Poitier appeared in two of the Best Picture nominees, but he’d been ignored in favour of the late Spencer Tracy and Steiger.

As for the event itself, on its 40th anniversary, at one point it might not have gone ahead at all.

When organisers realised proceeding as scheduled would mean no people attending out of shock and respect for Dr King, it was postponed by two days for the first time in its history so it took place after the iconic leader’s funeral.

Not only that, but there’d been a recent trend of nominees choosing not to show up, something that Academy president Gregory Peck was doing his best to rectify. In the end, 18 out of 20 acting nominees attended – only Katherine Hepburn who was in Europe and Tracy, who was dead, didn’t come.

But as 2016 sees the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences promising to address the lack of non-white nominees, it’s worth pointing out that Hollywood was able to fool itself into believing they’d sorted the diversity issue back in 1968.

Poitier missed out, but his work was celebrated in the two films he appeared. Black performer Beah Richards was up for Best Supporting Actress for ‘Dinner’ and Sammy Davis Jr. (above) sang ‘Talk to the Animals’ from ‘Doctor Dolittle’ on the night. When ‘In the Heat of the Night’ won Best Picture, the industry notched it up as another win for the creative community.

“It was just too damn easy to manipulate people with issues which for the moment [had] flagged their attention,” said ‘In the Heat of the Night’ writer Stirling Silliphant later.

“It had a lot to do with timing,” the film’s director Norman Jewison subsequently told author Mark Harris. “We happened to arrive at a moment when people felt strongly about race.”

Gregory Peck was a well-loved icon who was clearly doing his utmost to make the best of things, but even his statement at the beginning of the night seemed trite.

“Society has always been reflected in its art and one measure of Dr King’s influence on the society we live in is that of the five films nominated for Best Picture of the Year, two dealt with subject of understanding between the races,” he announced.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Old-school host Bob Hope (below) didn’t even think the ceremony should’ve been delayed. ‘It didn’t affect me,’ he said in his opening monologue, ‘but it’s been tough on the nominees. How would you like to spend two days in a crouch?’

Hope’s conservative material bombed and most of the winners didn’t quite seem to know what to do when they got on-stage. With the Academy promising to make sure acceptance speeches super-short this year, they could look to 1968 for inspiration.

Cinematographer Burnett Guffey won for ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and said, “Thanks everyone who helped me do it. That’s really all I can say.”

First-time recipient Alfred Hitchcock was even pithier. “Thank you,” he said, then started to walk off before returning and adding, “Very much indeed.”

Decades later, cultural commentators still point to the 1968 ceremony as being a crucial turning point – the Europhile avant garde sensibility within many of its nominees starting the revolution that would lead to the so-called golden age of the 1970s courtesy of Scorsese, Coppola and co.

But it’s worth noting that many of the challenges still facing Hollywood haven’t changed in the intervening 48 years. Two months before the ceremony in February 1968, the Presidentially-appointed Kerner Commission issued a report which argued the film and television industry needed to address its inherent racism by looking to better represent non-white people on-screen and behind the camera.

As the 2016 ceremony approaches, #OscarsSoWhite is doing the same thing. Just how that will affect the night – and if anyone will address it seriously like Steiger did – remains to be seen.

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Image credits: Rex_Shutterstock, Getty