The 41st Academy Awards were presented on April 14, 1969, to honor the films of 1968. They were the first Oscars to be staged at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, and the first with no host since the 20th Academy Awards.
Oliver! became the only Best Picture winner to have received a G-rating prior to winning, the ratings system having replaced the old Hays Code on November 1, 1968 (though a number of Best Picture winners have received the rating retroactively). It was the last British film to win Best Picture until Chariots of Fire in 1982, and the last musical to win until Chicago in 2003.
The year was notable for the first—and so far, only—tie for Best Actress: Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand shared the award, for their performances in The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl, respectively, marking the third occurrence of a tie in Oscar history. Hepburn became the second actress and third performer to win an acting Oscar two years in a row (having won for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner the previous year), after Luise Rainer in 1937 (The Great Ziegfeld) and 1938 (The Good Earth), and Spencer Tracy in 1938 (Captains Courageous) and 1939 (Boys Town). She also became the first to win three acting Oscars in lead categories (an achievement later matched by Daniel Day-Lewis and Frances McDormand).
Stanley Kubrick received his only career Oscar this year, for Best Visual Effects as special effects director and designer for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cliff Robertson's performance in Charly, which had received a mixed reception from critics and audiences, engendered controversy when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. 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."
A few people griped over the failure of Paul Newman to get an Academy Award nomination for his direction of the film Rachel, Rachel, despite him receiving a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Circle.
Also notable this year was the only instance to date of the Academy revoking an Oscar after the ceremony: Young Americans won the award for Best Documentary Feature Film, but on May 7, 1969, it was discovered that it had premiered in October 1967, thus making it ineligible. Journey into Self, the first runner-up, was awarded the Oscar the following day.
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Controversy over the Tonight Show announcing the winners hours before the ceremony
A minor controversy was created when, in a sketch on The Tonight Show, which was recorded three hours before the awards ceremony, Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett announced Oliver! as the winner for Best Picture and Jack Albertson as 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". 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". Carson would go on to host the ceremony five times.
The televised ceremony
On the day after the broadcast, the live ABC television audience was estimated at 60 million in the United States. It was the first Oscars to be widely telecast throughout the world – live in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and licensed for delayed broadcast in at least 30 other countries.
The show opened outdoors at night in downtown Los Angeles. English actors Ron Moody and sixteen-year-old Jack Wild were in character as Fagin and the Artful Dodger, from Best Picture nominee Oliver!. Fagin assured Dodger that if they didn't win the golden statuette, they would "pinch it."
The president of the academy, Gregory Peck, taped a pre-recorded opening in the empty lobby of the new venue, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Peck introduced Ingrid Bergman, the first of ten "friends of Oscar." Each actor presented the next in turn, with Jane Fonda introducing Frank Sinatra as "Nancy Sinatra's dad." Sinatra responded by thanking "Henry Fonda Junior." Tony Curtis was a last-minute replacement for Warren Beatty, who had the mumps.
Jack Albertson was presented with the first award of the night – Best Supporting Actor. Albertson got choked up thanking Frank D. Gilroy, the screenwriter of The Subject Was Roses.
The teleprompter was not yet invented, so the presenters read off of handwritten cue cards. During the Best Original Screenplay presentation (which was won by Mel Brooks for The Producers), comedian Don Rickles carried a cue card up to Frank Sinatra at the podium.
A surprise "friend of Oscar" was revealed by Walter Matthau; a little monkey dressed in a tux brought John Chambers the statuette for special achievement in makeup for Planet of the Apes.
Ten-year-old Mark Lester, who portrayed the title role of Oliver!, handed an honorary Oscar to the musical's Canadian choreographer, Onna White.
Towards the end of the ceremony, Bob Hope presented an emotional Martha Raye with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Hope, the host of seventeen previous Oscar shows, quipped "I finally made it," adding that he had been waiting at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Oscar home from 1961 to 1968.
Winners and nominees
Nominees were announced on February 24, 1969. Winners are listed first and highlighted in boldface.
Honorary Awards
To John Chambers for his outstanding makeup achievement for Planet of the Apes.
To Onna White for her outstanding choreography achievement for Oliver!.
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
Martha Raye
Presenters
Ingrid Bergman (Presenter: Best Actress and Best Cinematography)
Ingrid Bergman, Diahann Carroll, Jane Fonda, Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood (Presenters: Best Director)
Diahann Carroll (Presenter: Best Special Visual Effects, Documentary Awards & the Honorary Award to Onna White)
Tony Curtis (Presenter: Best Supporting Actress, Short Subjects Awards and Documentary Awards)
Jane Fonda (Presenter: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Costume Design and Short Subjects Awards)
Bob Hope (Presenter: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Martha Raye)
Burt Lancaster (Presenter: Best Actor, Best Special Visual Effects and the Scientific or Technical Awards)
Mark Lester (Presenter: Honorary Academy Award to Onna White)
Henry Mancini and Marni Nixon (Presenter: Best Original or Adaptation Score)
Walter Matthau (Presenter: Best Film Editing & the Honorary Award to John Chambers)
Gregory Peck (Presenter: Best Original Score for a Motion Picture (Not a Musical))
Pink Panther (Presentation: Best Short Subject – Cartoons)
Sidney Poitier (Presenter: Best Picture)
Don Rickles (Presenter: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen)
Performers
Source
José Feliciano ("The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair)
Aretha Franklin ("Funny Girl" from Funny Girl)
Abbey Lincoln ("For Love of Ivy" from For Love of Ivy)
Paula Kelly and the UCLA Band ("Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Frank Sinatra ("Star!" from Star!)