Oscar Best Pictures - 1950s/1960s

In two decades, the last filled with political and social unrest, movies went from dramas and romances to epics and musicals. The Academy Awards reflected these changes.

The Academy Awards for best picture in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from stories dealing with everyday people to epics to musicals to a x-rated film. Here are some of them, with accompanying stories, from those two decades.

Films from the 1950s

• The Greatest Show on Earth was a surprise when it won in 1952, competing against High Noon, Ivanhoe, Moulin Rouge, and The Quiet Man. Today, it is considered by film critics and historians as one of the weakest pictures to ever win an Oscar. It is the only best picture to never have won at least one other award in either acting or directing.
• Another surprise winner was 1955’s Marty, beating out Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Mister Roberts, Picnic and The Rose Tattoo. A simple tale of two lonely people, it played well with audiences and has two distinctions: At 91 minutes, it is the shortest best picture in history and it is the only best picture adapted from television, originally airing on the Goodyear Television Playhouse.
• Epics and spectaculars, often running near three hours or more, dominated the last half of the decade. In 1956, Around the World in Eighty Days won five Oscars, to be followed the next year by David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai which won a total of seven. However, neither of these could match William Wyler’s 1959 mega-epic, Ben-Hur. A remake of the 1925 silent, the film received eleven Oscars, a total only matched by Titanic (1997) and 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
• Other winners from the fifties were: All about Eve (1950), An American in Paris (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and Gigi (1958).

1960s Films

• The 1960 winner was Billy Wilder's social commentary, The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and a young Shirley MacLaine. A story of a man caught in office politics, it was the last best picture to be filmed fully in black and white [Schindler's List (1993) was 90% b & w].
• In 1962, another epic from David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia, won the Oscar, arguably against the toughest competition since 1939. Other nominees that year were: The World War II epic The Longest Day, The Music Man, the beloved anti-discrimination film To Kill a Mockingbird, and the remake of 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty.
• In a decade of political and social turmoil, many people sought relief in movies. This may be part of the reason why out of the ten best picture musicals, four were from the 1960s. [In addition to these four, four others were nominated] The winners were: West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), and Oliver! (1968). The only musical to win since then was Chicago in 2002.
• Other winners included the bawdy Tom Jones (1963), the bio-pic A Man for All Seasons (1967), and 1968’s plea for racial tolerance, In the Heat of the Night, a film that Sidney Poitier has called his favorite of all those he has done.
• The decade ended with two notable firsts. In 1969, Midnight Cowboy became the first X-Rated film to win best picture. That same year, the political thriller "Z" won an Oscar as Best Foreign Language film. It thus became the shortest-titled movie to ever win an Academy Award.

For more information on the Oscars see: Osborne, Robert, 75 Years of the Oscar. New York: Abbeville Press, 2003; The Official Academy Award Site; Oscar, Oscar

More Oscar Topics: Oscars for Direction - 1950s/1960s, Best Acting Oscars - 1950s/1960s

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