And the SINNER is...
Gwynnie’s seat-squirming acceptance speech? Joan Crawford’s jaw-dropping sabotage? Beatty and Dunaway’s envelope mix-up? As we await tonight’s show, Event nominates the winners, losers and most shameless schmoozers from 90 years of the Oscars...
THE MOST DESPERATE
Anyone who enjoyed the BBC2 drama Feud won’t be surprised by this one. Step forward Joan Crawford, who in 1963 was outraged that Bette Davis, her co-star in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, was hot favourite to win Best Actress, while she hadn’t even been nominated.
Not only did Crawford start a behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade Academy members to vote for ‘anyone but Davis’, she then volunteered to be a stand-in for any nominees who couldn’t be there on the night. So when Anne Bancroft emerged as the Best Actress winner for The Miracle Worker, the audience watched as a gloating Crawford walked up to accept the award, leaving a stunned Davis in her seat.
MOST RIDICULOUS POLITICAL STUNT
Depending on your point of view, Marlon Brando was either one of the finest screen actors ever to have lived or the founding father of incomprehensible ‘mumblecore’ acting.
In 1973 he caused Academy outrage when he sent Californian Apache Sacheen Littlefeather to decline the Best Actor award he’d just won for The Godfather. This, she politely explained, was Brando’s protest against Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans. Her speech – she was limited to just 60 seconds – was met with a mix of boos and applause, while backstage afterwards she treated press to a 15-page speech Brando had prepared.
WORST LOSER
Part of the fun of Oscar night is the sight of the losers forcing a rictus smile as they watch the delighted winner make their way to the stage. So who can’t love Ellen Burstyn, who, in 1974, had been nominated for The Exorcist and then had to watch as an absent Glenda Jackson won her second Best Actress Oscar in three years for A Touch Of Class. ‘What a surprise...’ mouthed Burstyn sarcastically on camera. But she didn’t have to sulk for too long – she won the award a year later for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
SYMPATHY VOTE
If there’s one thing that sentimental Academy voters like more than a film star, it’s a dead or dying film star, which probably explains Elizabeth Taylor’s surprise win in 1961 for Butterfield 8. In the run-up to the awards she’d been in hospital with ‘life-threatening’ pneumonia. However, she recovered enough to make a breathy acceptance speech, leaving fellow nominee Shirley MacLaine, who’d been nominated for The Apartment, to joke that she ‘lost out to a tracheotomy’.
THE CLOSE-RUN THING
Katharine Hepburn holds the record for winning four Best Actress Oscar statuettes, but the reclusive star never turned up in person to collect any of them. In 1969 she became part of Oscar history again when she – for The Lion In Winter – and Barbra Streisand – for Funny Girl – tied for the Best Actress award.
THE BEST TRIP
As intrepid archer Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games films, Jennifer Lawrence is fleet of foot and sure of shot.
However, she is distinctly less so when it comes to accepting awards in front of large groups of people.
In 2013 she took a memorable tumble as she made her way up the stairs to accept her Best Actress award for Silver Linings Playbook, blaming her fall on her failure to master the ‘kick, walk, kick, walk’ her stylist had recommended to master her frothy Dior gown.
A year later, she tripped again as she reached the Oscars’ famous red carpet.
The good news is, she’s not nominated for any movie this year so should be safe.
MOST INDISCREET SPEECH
In the Nineties, Tom Hanks won consecutive Best Actor Oscars, first for the Aidsera drama
Philadelphia and then for Forrest Gump. But it was during this first acceptance speech that he caused a stir by ‘outing’ his drama teacher, Rawley Farnsworth, who had previously kept his sexuality a secret. Four years later, Hanks’s slip would inspire the comedy In & Out.
WORST FEUD
In 1942, feuding sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine both found themselves nominated for Best Actress – de Havilland for Hold Back The Dawn and Fontaine for Hitchcock’s Suspicion. Fontaine won, which might explain why, five years on, after winning the Oscar herself, for To Each His Own, de Havilland gave her younger sister the cold shoulder when she came over to congratulate her.
MOST OUTRAGEOUS OUTFIT
Thirty years on, most of us can still remember the dress Cher wore to the 1988 Oscars. Designed by Bob Mackie, the gown was little more than a bra top and some modesty-preserving sequins held together by a tube of sheer, flesh revealing, navel-exposing fabric. Such is the excitement it caused, it is often forgotten that Cher won Best Actress for Moonstruck that year.
MOST BLATANT SNUB
In 1965, My Fair Lady won eight of the 12 categories in which it had been nominated. But while Rex Harrison walked away with Best Actor, there was nothing for co-star Audrey Hepburn, not even a nomination. Apparently, Academy voters couldn’t forgive the fact that Hepburn had been cast in the role of Eliza Doolittle rather than Julie Andrews, who had created the role on Broadway, which they made quite clear when the practically perfect Andrews won Best Actress for Mary Poppins that year.
KEEPING COOL UNDER FIRE
British film legend David Niven didn’t bat an eyelid when a moustachioed streaker ran on stage while he was presenting the award for Best Picture at the 1974 ceremony. Famous for his wit, the always immaculately turned out Niven brought the house down with his improvised one-liner: ‘The only laugh that man will ever get in his life is
by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.’
WORST OVERSIGHT
Marilyn Monroe is one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons but possibly not the greatest actress, which perhaps explains why her career was untroubled by even a nomination. But more illustrious acting careers have never been topped with the ultimate accolade – Glenn Close has been nominated six times but never won, while Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole were nominated seven and eight times respectively.
At least the Academy gave O’Toole an honorary Oscar, ten years before he died. Even then he initially turned it down pleading for more time ‘to win the lovely bugger outright’.
BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT
It’s hard to believe but some winning performances have been shorter than the acceptance speeches you’ll hear tonight.
The distinguished stage actress Beatrice Straight, who played William Holden’s put-upon wife in Network, was on screen for little more than five minutes but still won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1977.
Judi Dench had to work a little harder for the same award in 1999, putting in just over eight minutes, as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love.
ALL TIME LOW(E)
Lady Gaga’s Sound Of Music tribute at the 2015 awards may have been dodgy, but Rob Lowe’s version of Proud Mary – in which he sang and danced with Snow White – for the 1989 Awards is considered the worst musical opening in Academy history. Particularly as Lowe had been involved with a sex-tape scandal involving a 16-year-old girl the year before.
THE PARTY-POOPERS
Despite being nominated 24 times as writer, director or actor, Woody Allen is a reliable no-show at the awards, although he did turn up in 2002 to pay tribute to his home city of New York after 9/11. Neither four-times winner Katharine Hepburn nor double-winner Glenda Jackson were present the years they won, although they subsequently made their peace with the Academy by agreeing to present awards.
MOST EMBARRASSING SPEECH
Even by the lachrymose standards of all Oscar nights, Gwyneth Paltrow’s unforgettable speech at the 1999 awards was exceptional.
She began crying the moment her name was announced – she won for her undeniably lovely performance in Shakespeare In Love – and never really stopped, blubbing her way through a speech in which she thanked everyone from the grandfather to her agent. Mind you, for sheer toe-curling efforts, Sally Field’s ‘I guess this proves you like me, right now you really like me’ as she won Best Actress for Places In The Heart in 1985 takes a lot of beating.
TRYING TOO HARD...
Sigourney Weaver went home from the 1989 Oscars empty-handed, even though she had been nominated for Best Actress for Gorillas In The Mist and Best Supporting Actress for Working Girl. Oscar tradition dictated that she should have gone home with at least one gong, but many academy members were reportedly furious at the blatant campaigning for the star, which included mail-outs of posters, mugs and T-shirts. Director Rob Reiner joked: ‘I have in my house more colour reproductions of Sigourney Weaver and a beautiful gorilla than I need.’
BIGGEST BLUNDER
One year on and it’s still difficult to believe that movie legends Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway who famously previously coupled up in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 were really responsible for this disaster. Dunaway, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1977 for her role as Diana Christensen in the multi award winning satire Network, could scarcely believe that 40 years later she’d be handing out the Oscar for Best Picture to the wrong film. In chaotic scenes, a confusedlooking Beatty gave the envelope to Dunaway, who announced that the award had gone to La La Land when Moonlight was the actual winner. The mistake was later blamed on vote-counters from PwC, who had got distracted by the glamorous goings-on backstage and handed Beatty the wrong envelope which contained the Best Actress winner Emma Stone for La La Land