41st Academy Awards

The 41st Academy Awards were presented on April 14, 1969 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. It was the first Academy Awards ceremony to be staged at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. For the first time since the 11th Academy Awards, there was no host.

Contents

• Winners
• Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
• Honorary Awards
• Presenters
• Performers
• References

Oliver! became the first—and so far, the only—G-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. By contrast, the following year would see the only X-rated film to win Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy. Oliver! would also be the last British film to win Best Picture until Chariots of Fire in 1982 and the last movie musical to win until Chicago in 2003 (though others have been nominated: Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, All That Jazz, Beauty and the Beast, Moulin Rouge!, and Les Misérables).

The year was notable for the first—and so far, only—tie for Best Actress (or any female acting category). Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl shared the award. Hepburn also became the second actress and third performer overall to win an acting Oscar two years in a row, after Luise Rainer in 1936 (The Great Ziegfeld) and 1937 (The Good Earth), and Spencer Tracy in 1937 (Captains Courageous) and 1938 (Boys Town). The previous year, Hepburn had won Best Actress for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

As the special effects director and designer for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick was the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects this year. It was the only Oscar he would ever win.

Cliff Robertson's performance in Charly was met with a generally mixed reception from critics and audiences. When he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, it engendered some controversy: 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."

At the ceremony, Young Americans was announced as the Documentary Feature winner. On May 7, 1969, the film was disqualified because it had played in October 1967, thus making it ineligible for a 1968 award. Journey Into Self, the first runner-up, was awarded the Oscar on May 8, 1969.

Controversy was created on Oscar night when Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett announced in a sketch on the evening's Tonight Show, which was recorded three hours before the awards ceremony, that Oliver! would be the winner for Best Picture and that Jack Albertson would win for 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." As Carson recalled it on the air years later, it created a huge controversy and people at Price Waterhouse were fired. 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." The Academy later hired Carson five times to host the ceremony.