One Oscar Tried to Kill the Other Should I Try Again
It'southward become cliche for actors, writers, and directors to say that they don't care about winning an Academy Accolade, even if they do. But in the ninety-year history of the Oscars, there take been very few people who won a golden knight statuette and then told the Academy of Motion-picture show Arts and Sciences to proceed it.
I of the virtually famous instances was in 1973, when Marlon Brando won Best Actor for his role in The Godfather. When the presenters announced that he'd won, the camera panned to an Apache actress named Sacheen Littlefeather, who the announcer stated would accept the award on Brando'due south behalf. But Littlefeather, who was the president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, soon clarified that she was really rejecting it for him.
"[Brando] very regretfully cannot have this very generous award," she said. "And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry … and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Genu." (The federal regime was so waging armed conflict against Native American activists in Wounded Knee, S Dakota.)
The backlash was swift. Midway through Littlefeather's speech communication, audience members booed. Later that night, Clint Eastwood mused about whether he should present the Best Movie honor "on behalf of all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns." Later on the ceremony, many people falsely claimed that Littlefeather was not actually Apache. John Wayne, for example, told the New York Times that "[Brando] should have appeared that night and stated his views instead of taking some little unknown girl and dressing her up in an Indian outfit."
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It was the commencement fourth dimension an actor had sent someone to refuse an Oscar in person, but information technology wasn't the first time someone had refused the award. George C. Scott besides famously rejected his Best Actor Oscar for the 1970 picture Patton. Yet unlike Brando, whose snub caught the Academy past surprise, Scott had actually been saying he wouldn't accept an Oscar for years.
George C. Scott as World War Two General George Patton, his 1971 Oscar nominated role. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Scott received a Best Supporting Histrion nomination for the 1959 picture Beefcake of a Murder without much fanfare. Only when he received another All-time Supporting Actor nomination for The Hustler two years later on, he told the Academy he didn't want it, since he disagreed, on principle, with a contest that pitted actors against each other. He didn't receive another nomination until 1971, when the Academy was forced to recognize his role as General George S. Patton.
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"Patton was such a universally praised performance, and he was such a shoe-in to win that year, that he had to exist nominated," says Dennis Bingham, the director of the motion-picture show studies program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Scott in one case again informed the Academy that he didn't take the nomination and wouldn't have an award. This made it all the more surprising when he won—causing presenter Goldie Hawn to exclaim "Oh my god" when she opened the envelope.
Bingham thinks this stunt actually worked out in the Academy's favor. "They were in one of their periodic spells where the public was questioning their legitimacy," he says. In the tardily 1960s, actor Cliff Robertson's successful advertizing campaign had raised questions about whether actors could essentially buy their awards, alerting to the public to the exercise of Oscar campaigning.
Extra Goldie Hawn afterwards announcing that George C. Scott had won the Academy Honour for all-time actor for his role in "Patton". Scott said he would ship the Oscar back if information technology was sent to him. (Credit: AP Photo)
"And so they took the Oscar to George C. Scott as an opportunity to say, 'Well, no one buys these awards, sometimes people don't even want them; we'll give it to George C. Scott because we just simply idea he was the best,'" Bingham says. "And then information technology actually did something to re-legitimize the award in the public's eyes," even as Scott publicly derided the ceremony as "a ii-60 minutes meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons."
Scott's accusation of "contrived suspense" may have been near keeping the winners a mystery until the ceremony, which the Academy hadn't always washed before the Oscars were televised. The advent of TV likewise made information technology more imperative for stars to show up to get their awards, rather than stay home and collect them later like Katharine Hepburn, who skipped all 12 times she was nominated, including the four times she won.
Simply fifty-fifty in the early on days of the Academy Awards, you could still make a statement with your absence if you did it right. Screenwriter Dudley Nichols did this when he became the first person to decline an Oscar for the 1935 motion-picture show, The Informant.
Nichols boycotted the Oscars to protest the Academy'due south refusal to acknowledge the Screen Writers' Society, among other unions. At the time, the Academy opposed contained unions on the grounds that the University itself already served as a union for workers. Nichols was the only winner to boycott the upshot and reject his laurels, even mailing it back twice when the Academy tried to transport information technology to him.
In 1938, Nichols' boycott payed off, when the National Labor Relations Board certified the Screen Writers Guild equally the representative of flick manufacture writers. Once the reason for his protest had passed, Nichols finally accepted his Oscar.
Source: https://www.history.com/news/brando-oscar-protest-sacheen-littlefeather-academy-award-refusal
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