It was a year full of surprises for the Academy Awards ceremony held on April 14, 1969 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.
In the Best Actress category, there was a tie with two winners – Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter and Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl. The only other time in Oscar history that two actors tied for the award was in 1932 when both Fredric March and Wallace Beery won statuettes for their performances in, respectively, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Champ. There was some controversy among Academy members over Streisand’s nomination from the beginning because she had been granted membership and the right to vote without the usual standard waiting procedure.
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Streisand raised eyebrows further on the night of the awards when she accepted her Oscar in a pair of see-through, Scassi bell-bottom pajamas which legendary designer Edith Head described as “shocking!” As for Hepburn, she became the first actress to win three Oscars (she would win a fourth for On Golden Pond in 1981). Meryl Streep would eventually outrank Hepburn and Bette Davis in the cumulative number of Academy Award nominations received; at present she has sixteen nominations compared to Davis’s ten and Hepburn’s twelve. There were other surprises and oversights in the Oscar race that year.
Paul Newman’s directorial debut Rachel, Rachel starring his wife Joanne Woodward scored a Best Picture nomination yet Newman didn’t garner a Best Director nomination. At the same time, Stanley Kubrick’s highly influential and visionary sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was overlooked in the Best Picture category yet Kubrick was nominated for Best Director. (He lost to Carol Reed for the musical Oliver! but 2001 at least won the Oscar for Best Effects.)
One of the most unexpected entries was in the Best Foreign Language Film category – Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball from Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party in power there had removed the film from distribution because they felt it was insulting to firemen. After a change in party leadership in Czechoslovakia, the film was finally released in 1968 but was quickly banned again – for life – when the Soviet Union invaded that country and reorganized their film industry and censorship procedures. Since French director Francois Truffaut, a champion of Milos Forman’s film, owned a piece of The Firemen’s Ball, the film could not be suppressed or destroyed and is why it ended up as an Oscar nominee. Ironically, it lost to the Russian entry that year, Sergey Bondarchuk’s lavish eight hour version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
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