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1969
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1969
Actor:
JOHN WAYNE in "True Grit", Richard Burton in "Anne
of the Thousand Days", Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight
Cowboy", Peter O'Toole in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips",
Jon Voight in "Midnight
Cowboy"
Actress:
MAGGIE SMITH in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", Genevieve
Bujold in "Anne of the Thousand Days", Jane Fonda in "They
Shoot Horses, Don't They?", Liza Minnelli in "The Sterile
Cuckoo", Jean Simmons in "The Happy Ending"
Supporting Actor:
GIG YOUNG in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", Rupert
Crosse in "The Reivers", Elliott Gould in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice",
Jack Nicholson in "Easy
Rider", Anthony Quayle in "Anne of the Thousand
Days"
Supporting Actress:
GOLDIE HAWN in "Cactus Flower", Catherine Burns in "Last
Summer", Dyan Cannon in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice",
Sylvia Miles in "Midnight
Cowboy", Susannah York in "They Shoot Horses, Don't
They?"
Director:
JOHN SCHLESINGER for "Midnight
Cowboy", Costa-Gavras for "Z", George Roy
Hill for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid", Arthur Penn for "Alice's Restaurant",
Sydney Pollack for "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"
 Although
unlikely, it was interesting that nominations and awards were
won by various kinds of 'Westerns' this year:
It was also noteworthy that two major competitors
this year, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid and Midnight
Cowboy, were quintessential buddy films - although
one reflected the dark side, while the other was light-hearted.
In the late 1960's, it was significant that the
Academy Awards honored British film-maker John Schlesinger's
seamy, hard-hitting film (with Nilsson singing
"Everybody's Talkin'" on the enhanced music track) Midnight
Cowboy as the Best Picture. It captured the graphic,
lonely alienation of the hustler's world of New York's Times
Square, and told a tale of a strange friendship between a would-be
Texan stud (Jon Voight) and a sickly drifter (Dustin Hoffman).
The film was daring, scandalous, and shocking
with its X-certificate for language and sex (not signifying
pornography but an adults-only subject with no one under 16
admitted). [This was remarkable since the previous year's Oscar
winner for Best Picture was the light-hearted musical Oliver!
(1968).] It was the first and only X-rated
Best Picture winner in Academy history (although it was re-rated
in the next decade with an R rating.) Both lead actors were
nominated for Best Actor - and both lost to John Wayne for True
Grit.
From its seven nominations, the film won three
awards (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay by
Waldo Salt), but was unable to win any of its three acting
nominations. [Waldo Salt won the film's third Oscar for his
witty screenplay that was adapted from James Leo Herlihy's
novel.]
The other films in the same category covered
a wide range of subjects:
- a historical drama/period piece by director
Charles Jarrott about the affairs of amoral King Henry VIII
(Richard Burton) who sets aside his wife for Anne Boleyn
(Genevieve Bujold) - Anne of the Thousand Days (with
ten nominations - more nominations than any other picture
in 1969, but with only one win - Best Costume Design).
[The film was produced by Hal Wallis, his 19th Best Picture
nomination - a record.] Sixties' historical pageants of this
sort (after the success of Becket (1964), A Man
for All Seasons (1966), and The Lion in Winter (1968))
were beginning to lose their popularity and impact
- the popular buddy film and revisionist Western
about two legendary outlaws by director George Roy Hill, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, (with seven nominations
and four wins, the most of all Best Picture nominees) - William
Goldman's Best Original Screenplay, Conrad Hall's Cinematography,
Burt Bacharach's Best Original Score, and Hal David's Best
Song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," a mix
of entertaining music and comedic bank-robbing with two handsome
male leads as the legendary outlaws
- the escapist musical and box-office failure
- a re-creation of the popular Broadway show adapted from
Thornton Wilder's play Matchmaker - with last year's
Oscar-winner Barbra Streisand miscast in the un-nominated
role of Dolly in director Gene Kelly's film, Hello, Dolly! (with
seven nominations and three wins - Best Art Direction/Set
Decoration, Best Sound, and Best Musical Score)
- a tough political melodrama about the assassination
of a 1960s Greek nationalist in director Costa-Gavras' French-Algerian
co-produced thriller, Z (with five nominations and
two wins - Best Film Editing and Best Foreign Language Film).
[Z was the first film nominated as Best Foreign
Language Film (1969) that also received a Best Picture
nomination. It was also the second non-English language
film to be nominated as Best Picture - the first was Jean
Renoir's Grand Illusion (1938), over thirty years
earlier.]
The Best Director award went to British director
John Schlesinger for Midnight
Cowboy. Four years earlier, Schlesinger's Darling was
also sexually permissive, with Julie Christie awarded Best
Actress in the film as a hip model.
Other high-impact films with Best Director nominations
included:
- Arthur Penn for Alice's Restaurant (the
film's sole nomination), a 60's countercultural, hippie re-creation
based upon folk singer Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's
Restaurant Massacre"
- Costa-Gavras for the political thriller Z,
originally subtitled "The Anatomy of a Political Assassination" and
based upon the 1963 real-life killing of a Greek liberal
- Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't
They? (with nine nominations, not including Best Picture,
and one win - Best Supporting Actor), the Depression-Era
tale based on Horace McCoy's novel, of the desperate, self-destructive
contestants in the Aragon Ballroom six-day marathon dances
of early 1930s Los Angeles - this film was conspicuously
missing from the Best Picture nominees
- George Roy Hill for Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The two co-stars of the Best Picture winner Midnight
Cowboy were fellow nominees for Best Actor:
- Jon Voight (with his first nomination) as
uneducated, wanna-be hustler/stud but naive blonde Texas
boy Joe Buck who, after being influenced by radio and TV
commercials, wants to pimp himself in the big city
- Dustin Hoffman (with his second nomination)
as grimy, tubercular, gimp-gaited, sickly street-savvy Bronx
hustler Enrico 'Ratso' Rizzo
The other two defeated Best Actor nominees were:
- Richard Burton (with his sixth of seven
unsuccessful career nominations) was nominated for his role
as boisterous King Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand
Days. [The character role of King Henry VIII has been
nominated more than any other literary or historical
figure - previously, Charles Laughton for The Private
Life of Henry VIII (1933), and Robert Shaw for A Man
for All Seasons (1966).]
- Peter O'Toole (with his fourth of eight
career nominations) was nominated for his playing of Arthur
Chipping - the beloved schoolmaster in the title role of
director Herbert Ross' directorial debut with the musical
remake of the 1939 film classic, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (with
two nominations and no wins), based upon James Hilton's novel
about a kind English all-boys school teacher.
Sixty-two year-old John Wayne's 'sentimental'
win of the Best Actor Oscar in 1969 (as a different kind of
cowboy from the one in the Best Picture of the year) has generally
been considered as a belated, long-overdue 'career' Oscar award
or 'sentimental favorite' award. He was nominated (this was
his second acting nomination, after being nominated as Best
Actor for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)) and finally won
for his 139th film, Henry Hathaway's True Grit, in a
self-parodying role as the one-eyed (eye-patched), mean-tempered,
hard-drinking, old US marshal named Rooster Cogburn who helps
a young girl (Kim Darby) and a Texas ranger avenge the murder
of the girl's father. [The film was remade in 2010 with Jeff
Bridges in the starring role.]
[Six years later, Wayne reprised his character
in the title role of the sequel Rooster Cogburn (1975).
Wayne would eventually appear in 151 films in his career. And
he had performed in some of the best films and roles ever created
- without nominations and/or Oscars:
But Wayne's only previous acting nomination
was for his role in the war film The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). The
Alamo (1960), in which Wayne served as producer, director,
and actor - as Davy Crockett - received a Best Film nomination.]
British thespian Maggie Smith's Best Actress
Award was won for the Ronald Neame-directed adaptation of Muriel
Spark's novel/play, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in
which she portrayed the title role of a 1930s elitist, spinsterish,
but inspirational, free-thinking, and eccentric teacher at
the conservative Edinburgh school for girls. [The win was her second nomination
- her first was for her role in Othello (1965).]
Smith's dark-horse win defeated two other favorites
and first-time nominees:
- Jane Fonda (with her first nomination) as
penniless, resolute, suicidal dance contestant and would-be
actress Gloria Beatty in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
- Liza Minnelli (with her first nomination in
her adult screen debut) as Pookie Adams, an eccentric, neurotic,
aggressive college student, in director Alan Pakula's debut
film, the romantic comedy The Sterile Cuckoo (with
two nominations and no wins)
- Genevieve Bujold (with her sole nomination
in her first major Hollywood film) as Anne Boleyn - the ill-fated
Anne whose days were numbered in Anne of the Thousand
Days
- Jean Simmons (with her second and last unsuccessful
nomination, following her loss for Hamlet (1948))
as Mary Wilson - an unhappily-married, unfulfilled woman
who seeks to find herself in director Richard Brooks' The
Happy Ending (with two nominations and no wins)
Gig Young (with his third career nomination -
and sole Oscar win) won the Best Supporting Actor award
for his role as "Yowsir"-yelling Rocky - the uncaring,
dissipated, ruthless emcee/Master of ceremonies of the tragic
dance marathons for desperate couples in They Shoot Horses,
Don't They? [Young had already been nominated twice before
for Come Fill the Cup (1951) and Teacher's Pet (1958).]
Other Best Supporting Actor nominees included:
- Anthony Quayle (with his sole career
nomination) as Cardinal Wolsey in Anne of the Thousand
Days
- newcomer Jack Nicholson (with his first nomination)
as George Hanson in one of the best youth-oriented, low-budget,
counter-cultural films of the late 1960s - a middle-class,
alcoholic lawyer who joins Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda
(as two motorcycling hippies) on a cross-country journey
in co-writer/director Hopper's debut film, Easy
Rider (with two nominations and no wins)
- Elliott Gould (with his sole nomination)
as conservative Ted Henderson - one member of the swinging,
spouse-swapping married couples in California in director
Paul Mazursky's debut film Bob & Carol & Ted
& Alice (with four nominations and no wins)
- Rupert Crosse (with his sole nomination) as
Ned McClaslin - a black servant (and Steve McQueen's sidekick)
who rides in a stolen car from small-town Mississippi to
Memphis in 1905 in the adapted William Faulkner tale directed
by Mark Rydell - The Reivers (with two nominations
and no wins). [Rupert Crosse was the first black actor
to be given a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He was only
the second black performer to receive an acting nomination
in either category - the first was Sidney Poitier.]
The Best Supporting Actress award was presented
to Goldie Hawn (with her first nomination - and sole Oscar
win) for her role as Toni Simmons - the infatuated mistress/girlfriend
(of dentist Walter Matthau) in director Gene Saks' Cactus
Flower (the film's sole nomination).
[The role was Hawn's first major screen
role (and second film) following star appearances as a giggly
and dumb, body-painted, bikini-clad, go-go blonde on late
60's TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. With her
win, she became the first actress to win a Best Supporting
Oscar while simultaneously starring in a TV-sitcom.]
Her fellow Best Supporting Actress nominees included:
- Dyan Cannon (with her first of two unsuccessful
career nominations) as Alice (Gould's wife) in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
- Sylvia Miles (with her first of two unsuccessful
nominations for brief cameo roles) as Cass - a wily hooker
who out-hustles $20 from Joe Buck for taxi cab fare in Midnight
Cowboy
- Susannah York (with her sole nomination) as
hopeful Jean Harlow-starlet Alice - another of the broken-down
dance contestants in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
- Catherine Burns (with her sole nomination)
as Rhoda - a slightly plump, homely teen who tragically comes
of age during a summer vacation on the white sands of Fire
Island, NY in director Frank Perry's dark film Last Summer (the
film's sole nomination)
Debonair leading man Cary Grant was presented
with this year's Special Honorary Oscar award, for "his
unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect
and affection of his colleagues." Grant had only been
nominated twice (and never won an Oscar) in his entire
career, uncharacteristically for dramas, as Best Actor for Penny
Serenade (1941) and for None But the Lonely Heart (1944),
but he was best-known for his screwball comedies, including Topper
(1937), The Awful Truth (1937), Holiday
(1938), Bringing
Up Baby (1938), His
Girl Friday (1940), The
Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Favorite Wife
(1940), for other Hitchcock collaborations, including Suspicion
(1941), Notorious
(1946), To Catch a Thief (1955),
and North
by Northwest (1959), and for the romantic melodrama An
Affair to Remember (1957).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Two westerns were entirely neglected by the Academy
in 1969 for Best Picture and Best Director:
- Sam Peckinpah's The
Wild Bunch (with only two nominations - Best
Adapted Screenplay and Best Score)
- Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968, It.) (with no nominations)
Although Easy
Rider received two nominations (that both lost),
Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry
Southern) and Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson), it
should also have been nominated for Best Picture for its
influential role and landmark place in cinematic history.
And Haskell Wexler's semi-documentary political
film Medium Cool lacked nominations in all categories.
Although Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? received
a remarkable nine nominations, one of them wasn't Best Picture.
It became the first (and only) film to receive the most nominations
ever (9) without being nominated for Best Picture.
Neither Paul Newman nor Robert Redford (in their
first teaming together) received Best Actor nominations as
the title characters in the box-office success, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Shirley Knight and James
Caan were both ignored for their performances in Francis Ford
Coppola's The Rain People: Knight as Natalie Ravenna
- an on-the-road pregnant housewife, and Caan as brain-damaged
ex-football player 'Killer' Jimmie Kilgannon. And ex-model
Ali McGraw was unnominated for her role as Jewish princess
Brenda in Goodbye, Columbus (with only one nomination
- Best Adapted Screenplay).
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