80 YEARS OF OSCAR MEMORIES
1929: First Academy Awards held at Hollywood’s Hotel Roosevelt. WWI drama “Wings” wins Best Picture.
1930: Best Actor George Arliss (“Disraeli”) and Best Actress Norma Shearer (“The DivorcÈe”) pose with their statuettes two days before the banquet.
1931: Ten-year-old Jackie Cooper, nominated for Best Actor in “Skippy,” falls asleep during the ceremony.
1932: Academy members pay $10 to attend the banquet. It sells out, anyway.
1933: The Academy skips a year in order to honor films made during the previous calendar year.
1934: Walt Disney calls his statuette “Oscar” while accepting Best Short Subject for “The Three Little Pigs.” Insiders used the nickname after Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, on first seeing the trophy, said, “It’s looks like Uncle Oscar.” The Academy adopts the name in 1939.
1935: Bette Davis snubbed for “Of Human Bondage.” Ensuing outrage inspires the Academy to allow write-in candidates.
1936: In an Oscar first, Best Writer winner Dudley Nichols (“The Informer”) refuses his award in solidarity with striking unions.
1937: Best Supporting Actor and Actress are recognized for the first time. But winners get plaques instead of statuettes.
1938: Spencer Tracy’s Best Actor Oscar for “Captains Courageous” is incorrectly engraved “Dick Tracy.”
1939: Shirley Temple stands on a chair to present Walt Disney with an honorary award for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
1940: Hattie McDaniel breaks the color barrier. She’s the first African American to attend the Oscars and the first to win, as Best Supporting Actress in “Gone With the Wind.”
1941: Orson Welles becomes the first simultaneous nominee for Best Picture, Actor, Director and Screenplay for “Citizen Kane.” He wins as a writer.
1942: As a symbolic gesture to the war effort, Oscar statuettes are made of plaster.
1943: The show is held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Awards’ first public venue.
1944: Best Supporting Actor and Actress receive full-sized Oscars instead of a miniature on a plaque.
1945: The Best Picture category is limited to just five nominees instead of as many as 10. Other categories soon follow.
1946: For the first time, nominated songs, including winner “It Might As Well Be Spring” from “State Fair,” are performed at the ceremony.
1947: For the first time, only Academy members can cast ballots.
1948: Foreign films finally get their due, as Italy’s “Shoe-Shine” picks up an honorary award.
1949: Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” becomes the first foreign film to win Best Picture. Olivier wins Best Actor.
1950: The Academy begins numbering statuettes, beginning with 501. “Mighty Joe Young” wins that one, for Best Special Effects.
1951: Marlene Dietrich steals the show when, ascending stairs to present an award, she flashes her fabulous gams.
1952: Marlon Brando’s breakout role in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is usurped for Best Actor by Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.”
1953: An estimated 43 million viewers tune in for the two-hour broadcast.
1954: Brando finally wins Best Actor for “On the Waterfront,” beating out, among others, Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny.”
1955: Best Actress nominee for “A Star Is Born,” Judy Garland is unable to attend because she’s in the hospital – as the mother of day-old Joey Luft.
1956: “Marty” becomes the first TV-to-motion-picture transfer to win Best Picture.
1957: For the first time, every Best Picture nominee is in color. “Around the World in 80 Days” wins.
1958: Miyoshi Umeki becomes the first Asian actress to win an Oscar, as Supporting Actress in “Sayonara.”
1959: “Gigi” breaks the record for most Oscars for a single film: nine.
1960: “Ben-Hur” shatters the record from the previous year, claiming 11 Oscars.
1961: The Oscar broadcast moves from NBC to ABC.
1962: Sophia Loren delivers the first foreign-language performance to win Best Actress in “Two Women.”
1963: At 16, Best Supporting Actress Patty Duke is the youngest Oscar winner for “The Miracle Worker.”
1964: Sidney Poitier is the first black man to win an Oscar, as Best Actor in “Lilies of the Field.”
1965: All four acting awards are won by non-Americans: Rex Harrison (“My Fair Lady”), Julie Andrews (“Mary Poppins”), Peter Ustinov (“Topkapi”) and Lila Kedrova (“Zorba the Greek”).
1966: “The Sound of Music” wins Best Picture, but star Julie Andrews loses her bid for a second Best Actress award to Julie Christie in “Darling.”
1967: Sisters Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave are both up for Best Actress (for “Morgan!” and “Georgy Girl,” respectively). But Elizabeth Taylor beats them both for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
1968: Bob Hope emcees the awards for the 14th straight year.
1969: First worldwide telecast goes out to 37 nations.
1970: Cary Grant receives an honorary Oscar. He’d been nominated twice, but never won.
1971: Best Picture winner “Midnight Cowboy” is the first and only X-rated film to be honored.
1972: The awards’ golden sheen wears thin. The LA Times claims host Bob Hope is “excruciatingly unfunny” and Variety says, “At 43, Oscar looked tired.”
1973: Marlon Brando sends Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse his Best Actor award for “The Godfather” to protest film portrayals of Native Americans.
1974: As David Niven introduces Elizabeth Taylor, a streaker runs across the stage, flashing a peace sign.
1975: “The Godfather: Part II” is the first sequel to win Best Picture.
1976: Best Actress for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Louise Fletcher is the first Oscar recipient to use sign language at the podium.
1977: “Network” star Peter Finch receives the first posthumous Best Actor award. He died of a heart attack two months before the awards.
1978: “Annie Hall” is the first comedy to win Best Picture since “Tom Jones” in 1964.
1979: Johnny Carson makes his first appearance as host of the Oscars.
1980: Sally Field wins Best Actress for “Norma Rae,” but later jokes that “the Academy is slacking off in the class quotient – after all, I won.”
1981: The awards are postponed for 24 hours after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.
1982: Katharine Hepburn’s fourth win, as Best Actress for “On Golden Pond” makes her the all-time Academy Award champ.
1983: German sub flick “Das Boot” gets six nominations, the most ever for a foreign film. It wins nothing.
1984: Oscar’s longest show, at three hours and 42 minutes. Says Shirley MacLaine: “This show has been as long as my career.”
1985: Steven Spielberg rages when the Awards producers consider barring his unwed and pregnant lover, Amy Irving, from appearing on the show.
1986: With 11 nominations and no wins, “The Color Purple” joins
1977’s “The Turning Point” as the two most nominated nonwinning films in the Academy’s history.
1987: Nominated for Best Actress in “Aliens,” Sigourney Weaver is the first female action star to be recognized by the Academy.
1988: The ceremony moves to LA’s Shrine Auditorium. Drivers get lost on the way and many stars, including pregnant Glenn Close, dash through traffic to get inside on time.
1989: The phrase “and the winner is” is replaced with “and the Oscar goes to.”
1990: “Driving Miss Daisy” is the first film to win Best Picture without a Best Director nod since “Grand Hotel” in 1932.
1991: “Dances With Wolves” is the first Western to win Best Picture since “Cimmaron” in 1931.
1992: Upon winning Best Supporting Actor for “City Slickers,” Jack Palance does one-arm push-ups.
1993: Al Pacino is the first actor to be nominated for leading (“Scent of a Woman”) and supporting (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) roles. He wins Best Actor.
1994: “Schindler’s List” is the first (mostly) black-and-white film to win Best Picture since “The Apartment” in 1961.
1995: Elton John and Tim Rice’s three “Lion King” songs are the most ever nominated in a single year. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” wins.
1996: In “Dead Man Walking,” Susan Sarandon is the first Best Actress winner to portray a nun.
1997: With nine Oscars, “The English Patient” dominates, but stars Ralph Fiennes and Kristen Scott Thomas go home empty-handed.
1998: “Titanic” ties “Ben-Hur” as the most-honored film in history with 11 awards. None of its actors wins.
1999: For the first time, the ceremony is held on Sunday.
2000: Angelina Jolie wins Best Supporting Actress for “Girl, Interrupted,” making her and Jon Voight the only father-daughter Oscar winners other than Henry and Jane Fonda.
2001: For the first time in 51 years, the Best Picture winner (“Gladiator”) doesn’t pick up an additional award for either Best Director or Best Screenplay.
2002: Halle Berry becomes the first African-American woman to win Best Actress for “Monster’s Ball.”
2003: All five of the Best Picture nominees were released in the last two weeks of 2002 (December 18 or after). “Chicago” wins.
2004: Billy Crystal hosts the awards for the eighth time.
2005: Clint Eastwood and Albert Ruddy share the Best Picture Oscar for “Million Dollar Baby.” Eastwood had been the presenter for Best Picture when Ruddy won his first Oscar as producer of “The Godfather” in 1973.
2006: With “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and “Syriana,” George Clooney is the first nominee for Best Director and Supportng Actor for different films. He wins Best Supporting Actor.
2007: With 71 letters and 12 words, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” has the longest title of any film ever nominated.
Sources: “65 Years of Oscar,” by Robert Osborne, “Inside Oscar” by Damien Bona and Mason Wiley, “The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History,” by Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza.
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