Stupid Oscars

Usually the Internet Movie Database forums are an intellectual cess pool of trolls, fanboys and gossip, but occasionally a nugget of wisdom emerges. A user named Fuzzynavel1 compiled an interesting series of posts regarding 40 years of Oscar Controversy and Stupidity. If he/she posts it anywhere permanent I'll revise the link.

A few choice excerpts for your amusement:

1972 – Charlton Heston was scheduled as the host, but when he got stuck in traffic, Clint Eastwood substituted. Eastwood was not prepared, it wasn’t his fault, and he was stuck with Heston’s material, which made no sense at all coming from him. Eastwood was so embarrassed that he decided never to return unless nominated. Thankfully, most people have forgotten about this atrocious mishap. This was also the year Sacheen Littlefeather accepted for Marlon Brando. His excuse for refusing the award was Hollywood and American society’s treatment of Native Americans. Whether he was sincere or simply staging an elaborate joke is still debated. Littlefeather was not much of a Native activist but an aspiring B-movie actress who later appeared in Playboy.

1977 - The Jewish Defence League showed up before the show to protest the nomination of Vanessa Redgrave for Best Supporting Actress because of her support for a Palestinian homeland. Several of them burned the actress in effigy. She had to be snuck in the back of an ambulance through a secret entrance to get her safely into the theater. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated the award to Hollywood’s courage in resisting “Zionist hoodlums”. Of course, the producers exploded, and it fell to Paddy Chayefsky to go onstage and denounce Redgrave for subverting the Oscars with her politics. She did have her defenders, including Foreign Film-winning Israeli director Moshe Mizrahi. After the ceremony, Redgrave went to dinner accompanied by her bodyguards and no one spoke to her. When Debby Boone performed Best Original Song nominee "You Light Up My Life", she was accompanied by a chorus of little girls who were announced to have come from The John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf and they interpreted the lyrics in sign language. It was later reported that the girls were really students rounded up at a nearby elementary school, and that they were actually signing gibberish. None of them were deaf.

1978 - The biggest controversy was started by Jane Fonda, who led a campaign to prevent The Deer Hunter from winning the top prize, suggesting that her own film Coming Home told the real story about Vietnam. She hadn’t actually seen The Deer Hunter, but her friends told her it was racist. During the post-awards press scrum, when asked about The Deer Hunter, she said “I still haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t matter because our film is the best one”.

1989 – Mel Gibson had recently presented an award via live hookup from Australia, and the feed accidentally opened up again during the performance. Gibson proceeded to munch on a sandwich throughout the entire song.

1991 – Originally, the producers of the show wanted Mother Teresa to present an honorary award to Satyajit Ray, but the idea was shelved when they thought it would be inappropriate to have her mingling among celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Madonna.

1999 - Eighteen days before the awards ceremony, 55 Oscar statuettes en route from Chicago to the Academy were stolen from a Roadway Express shipping dock in Bell, California. A week and a half later, a scrap metal dealer, Willie Fulgear, found 52 of the statuettes in a Dumpster behind a grocery store. For finding the awards, Mr. Fulgear received two tickets to the Academy Awards show where he was given a $50,000 check from the shipping company. A few months later, $40,000 of his reward was stolen from a safe in his apartment. In June 2003, FBI agents in South Florida performing a drug bust found one of the three missing Oscar statuettes.

I knew there was a reason I hated the Oscars.