Success or Snub? Oliver! (41st Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

Yellow Submarine (Full Album)~The Beatles

        To ascertain whether or not any one movie deserved to be called the best movie of 1968 requires some context of the year 1968 first. 1968 was one of those years that comes along once in a generation where everything hits the fan all at once (if you remember 2020, 1968 was your grandparents’ 2020). Public opinion turned against the Vietnam War with the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre occurred (though wasn’t revealed to the press until years later), civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, race riots broke out all across the country as a result, Senator Robert F. Kennedy ran for President on a platform of quelling this violence and bringing racial harmony, he was also killed for his troubles, the Cannes Film Festival was canceled because of student riots in France, protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago broke into a full-scale riot when the Mayor of Chicago gave the police orders to shoot to kill, protestors were murdered by the police outside of the Mexico City Summer Olympics, the President of Columbia University was kidnapped by student radicals, student sit-ins in South Carolina were murdered, Andy Warhol was shot (though not killed) by a deranged feminist, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran a disturbingly strong third-party ticket for President on a platform of reinstituting segregation, the Zodiac Killer began his murder spree and this year of politics ultimately ended with Richard Nixon becoming President, a job he did so divisively that his name would become a byword for the archetypical scumbag politician.
        Combine this with how many groundbreakers occurred in the previous Academy Awards ceremony, the fact that the convention of the Academy on April 14th, 1969 resulted in a cute little musical being designated as the best movie of the year is a bit of a head-scratcher. This might seem like a snub flat-out but the Hollywood New Wave wasn’t quite in full swing yet. I mean it was there after The Graduate (1967) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) opened the floodgates but not fully dominating in stuff that was reaching full production. Here, let me try to explain.
        On average, from conception to release, the full production cycle of a movie, especially big-budget ones like Oliver!, will take about 2 years (sometimes longer). This isn’t a hard and fast rule but it does explain some mysteries of how you might look at a film and say, “What were they thinking when they made this?” Usually, very astute filmmakers who want to commentate on a current event or trend will ultimately release their picture right as society is able to fully examine said current event or trend. So, like how In the Heat of the Night (1967) was greenlit sometime in 1965 and Norman Jewison and co. were perceptive enough to see that racial segregation wasn’t going to be solved overnight by the time their movie was released and, sure enough, in 1967, In the Heat of the Night was more timely and relevant than ever.
        Assuming we use this 2-year pattern as a rule of thumb, this means that most of the films that came out in 1968 were probably greenlit in 1966; before the big hits of the Hollywood New Wave. As a result, 1968 was definitely not as strong a year for movies as 1967 or 1969. There were still movies that came out that could be considered part of the New Wave but, since the New Wave gross hadn’t kicked in yet, it wasn’t quite as prolific as it would be. It has been said that 1968 was the last year of the 60s as the counterculture knew it and that also reflects itself in the movies. 1968 sort of exists in this weird grey zone where the old guard were still releasing movies but some more prescient stuff was coming out as well but not quite as earthshaking as stuff like, say, In the Heat of the Night or Midnight Cowboy (1969). So, by this metric, could Oliver! have been the best movie of the year? Let’s find out.
        Several award winners in the Academy came under critique for their choices. First was the Academy Award for Best Documentary, which went to Young Americans

a sickeningly saccharine and schmaltzy documentary of students who compete in an inter-high school choir tournament. Apparently, the Academy didn’t do a good enough job vetting it as Young Americans was actually released in 1967, not 1968. Thus, for the first time ever, the Academy Award was revoked on the basis of release dates and instead awarded to the runner-up, Journey into Self

which exists at the opposite end of the crap-o-meter as it’s navel-gazing, pretentious, cinema vérité crap.
        The Academy Award for Best Leading Actor was roundly lambasted when it was given to Cliff Robertson in Charly.

 

        Charly is an adaptation of Flowers for Algernon (1958), a short story that revolves around an intellectually disabled man named Charly Gordon (Robertson) who is given a surgical procedure that makes him smarter. Thus, the movie is one of the earliest examples of an actor going, to borrow a quote from Tropic Thunder (2008), “full retard” where a perfectly able-bodied actor will play a handicapped person in a manipulative attempt to try to get its actor an Academy Award. And, to be fair, Robertson is nowhere near the most exploitative example of this as he does play the part well though the movie, while decent, is nowhere near as great as the short story it’s based on. Flowers for Algernon is a kinda timeless commentary of the phrase ignorance is bliss and questions if Charly was happier as a simpleton or a genius. The core story is adapted well enough though the movie botches it by trying to have a few isms of the time period (there’s a sequence where a self-destructive Charly tries living as a hippie for a bit and it’s as Godawful as it sounds).
        We’ll discuss the manipulation of this trope in later installments but, for now, it did come out that Robertson, like many others, had schmoozed Academy members to ensure his win. The Academy, for the first time ever, conducted a mea culpa of this and apologized though not enough to institute a rule to prevent them from happening again. Though, in terms of snubs, it’s not quite clear what the New Hollywood crowd thought should’ve won instead nor was there a role that was so great that it makes Robertson’s win seem egregious by comparison.
        Another complaint was the snub of Rachel, Rachel

for Best Director. This was the directorial debut of Paul Newman, being a Tennessee Williams-esque tale that examines the life of a woman named Rachel (Joanne Woodward). Despite New Hollywood’s complaining, the directing job is pretty shoddy and trying way too hard to be artistic and I think the bellyaching was more about one of them not being represented in the top 5.
        The final piece of trivia was that the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress was a tie from opposite ends of the age gap. Katharine Hepburn won for her role as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Academy frontrunner, The Lion in Winter

and Barbra Streisand won for Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.

        The Lion in Winter is a medieval drama that revolves around the power plays between Queen Eleanor and her husband King Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole). Of the brief medieval drama craze of the 60s, this, along with A Man for All Seasons (1966), is usually considered to be the best one and was highly-regarded when it came out, being nominated for and winning numerous awards.
        Funny Girl was the highest-grossing movie of 1968 and was also highly-regarded, particularly in its portrayal of Jewish culture. Along with Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), Barbra Streisand was the first ever Jewish heartthrob, being sexy and playing a role we’d seen before with a very acidic and distinctively Jewish wit. Both Hoffman and Streisand were major step forwards in Jewish representation in cinema, bringing the ethnicity that was usually tokenized into the mainstream but not doing so in such a way that beats you over the head with it.
        While both actresses are great and the movies were well-regarded at the time, neither has aged that well and, to be quite honest, I am having difficulty understanding why they were considered so good in their time. The Lion in Winter, like most other medieval dramas of the era, doesn’t have much richness of themes or seem to have anything you can really read too deeply into. And I really struggle to understand why Funny Girl was so popular to become the highest-grossing movie of the year. Once you get past Streisand, the movie is every single clichéd set-up in every single backstage musical that audiences would’ve seen hundreds of times before this (i.e. A Star is Born (1937), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Gypsy (1962) etc.) and you can call each and every single plot beat before it ever happens (though “Don’t Rain on My Parade” is a good song but there are better ones out there to make into your career-long leitmotif).
        While Funny Girl may have been clichéd, 1968 wasn’t a bad year for musicals, especially after the genre took a massive shellacking in 1967. Though they weren’t all what you would consider traditional musicals and the counterculture started to seep into this most old-school of Hollywood genres. More typical of the era was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

a delightful family adventure about an inventor named Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) who, with his two children (Heather Ripley and Adrian Hall) and girlfriend Truly (Sally Ann Howes), builds a magical car and uses it to go on an adventure. The film has the perfect level of whimsy, memorable songs, lovable characters and one of the most iconic and creepiest villains ever in a kids’ movie, the creepy (and possibly pedophilic) Child-Catcher (Robert Helpmann).
        On the other side of the musical spectrum was arguably the Beatles’ most famous film, Yellow Submarine.

        An animated adaptation of the album of the same name (pioneering a new genre of rock opera movies such as The Who’s Tommy (1975) and Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982)), the film follows animated versions of John (John Clive), Paul (Geoffrey Hughes), George (Peter Batten) and Ringo (Paul Angelis) as they go through a bizarre wonderland to try to rescue an oppressed kingdom. Despite having all the potential for a cheap cash grab, Yellow Submarine demonstrates an impressive level of creativity, far beyond what anyone may expect going into this film. I have heard of this movie being considered the first animated film made for an adults, as the genre was mainly associated with children, but this is a record I question as Yellow Submarine still seems like a pretty kid-friendly movie that you could easily show your toddler. Then again, considering how the hippie philosophy was pretty childish anyway, I guess young adults at the time thought it was made it for them. (I’ll also fully admit that I didn’t quite love this movie either but, in fairness, I also watched it while sober which is clearly not how it was meant to be watched.)
        Another counterculture high-grosser was Monterey Pop.

        This was basically a filmed concert DVD of the 1967 Monterey International Pop Concert, before DVDs were a thing and you could actually see something like this in the theater. I’m also talking about it because it has another hilarious making-of story attached. The footage for Monterey Pop was already officially licensed out to ABC, who refused to air it and sat on the footage after Jimi Hendrix concluded his set by dry-humping his amps. Counterculture videojournalist D. A. Pennebaker (illegally) shot the concert without the permission of the network and managed to get in touch with John Lennon, who underwrote the movie and helped distribute it, in exchange for Pennebaker and his crew smuggling heroin into the UK for him by hiding it in their camera equipment.
        Considering how the big winner of the night was a musical, and the terrible musicals of 1967 were all routinely nominated, it’s interesting how these three were completely ignored and Oliver! and Funny Girl were the only ones to receive any accolades. While the title song of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was nominated for Best Original Song, the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Set Design, Best Visual Effects or an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Robert Helpmann (or even a cumulative “owed” award for the great Gert Fröbe as the other villain, Baron Bomburst).
        Similarly, Yellow Submarine was completely ignored for Best Visual Effects and Monterey Pop could’ve warranted a nod for Best Documentary, as it’s far more interesting and informative of the times than the two movies that won. Though, at least in Monterey Pop’s case, considering how many laws were broken in the process of making it, it’s probably understandable why they wouldn’t have been in any rush to try to get it acknowledged by the Academy Awards.
        Moving onto some more quick-hitters. A groundbreaker in action filmmaking was Bullitt

a fairly decent contemporary film noir that broke ground with its famous and revolutionary car chase. There were car chases in silly movies like The Bank Dick (1940) before this and some vehicle chases in the Bond movies but those usually heavily relied on the green screen. Bullitt felt a lot grittier and, for lack of a better term, real. The music is completely muted, just allowing you to focus on the sounds of the revving motors as our hero chases down his prey. The rest of the movie isn’t anything special but this one scene made Bullitt a classic and earned it a very deserved Academy Award for Best Editing.
        A landmark in independent filmmaking came out that year with Night of the Living Dead.

        The first ever zombie movie and one of the most famous movies of all time, just about every major cliché of the zombie sub-genre comes from this movie, with its shrieking protagonist, unending hordes of the living dead and the creeping dread of cabin fever as our heroes are trapped in the same house and debate how to survive. It was also a landmark in representation in movies as the protagonist Ben (Duane Jones) was originally written to be played by a white man but Romero chose to cast Jones and never rewrote the character. So, unlike Sidney Poitier’s movies, this is a truly racially-blind character that the movie never once brings up.
        I think it goes without saying that Night of the Living Dead wasn’t acknowledged by the Academy as they tend to choose to not acknowledge independent cinema, no matter how much ground they break. Probably because doing so would, ipso facto, be acknowledging that someone in the Hollywood establishment could be challenged by someone outside of it which would go against the entire ethos of this show. But what makes this bizarre though is 1968 was one of those rare times that they did acknowledge an independent film, that being John Cassavetes’ Faces.

        Cassavetes was one of the grandpas of independent filmmaking, with his movie, Shadows (1959), being considered one of the first beat films and completely unlike anything that audiences at the time would have ever seen. Faces builds on the concept by showing the miasma of middle-aged, middle-class prima donnas, complete with his own unique improv-heavy dialogue and uncomfortable close-ups. There’s an interesting throughline in these types of movies here as one of the most famous films of the era was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) which was clearly greatly influenced by Shadows. Faces, in turn, hits on similar themes as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but takes the style up a few more notches.
        The fact that Faces was acknowledged at all by the Academy Awards is commendable and shows that they were willing to acknowledge New Hollywood with the old. Still, if they’re going to open up the awards, why do so to Faces and not Night of the Living Dead? The answer is that Faces is closer to “high art” than Night of the Living Dead though the latter’s experiments with claustrophobia and commentary on the times should’ve been acknowledged, even if as an honorary award. But, if we’re being quite frank, if you go back and rewatch Night of the Living Dead, its cheapness and sloppiness is definitely noticeable and it’s more noteworthy for the ground it broke. Romero would have a long career of using zombie movies to commentate on contemporary Americana so this won’t be the last time we hear of him.
        One of the best movies of 1968, and frontrunners at the Academy Awards, was Romeo and Juliet.

        This is often considered the best adaptation of the famous play, revolving around the forbidden romance of medieval teenagers, Romeo Montague (Leonard Whiting) and Juliet Capulet (Olivia Hussey), who fall in love whilst their families are at each other’s throats. Besides the beautiful production design and actors giving the Bard’s beautiful prose their all, this is notable as being the first major film production where the two protagonists are played by actual teenagers. As a result, this made Romeo and Juliet very popular with younger audiences who were able to see themselves in the two star-crossed lovers (and make later audiences alarmed by the on-screen nudity).
        Long-time readers of this series may remember that we reviewed the Golden Age of Hollywood version of Romeo and Juliet (1936) a long time ago where we criticized both that film and the popular depiction of the story for trying to treat Romeo and Juliet’s tryst as the greatest romance in the history of fiction even though they enjoy what is a pretty shallow and unhealthy relationship. This is the movie that gets the story right: Romeo and Juliet were a pair of dumb teenagers who were unable to healthily explore their attraction because of their arguing parents which is what sets the two on a collision course with tragedy. Given the generation gap of 1968, it’s easy to see why this was one of those rare Shakespeare adaptations that caught on with popular audiences.
        Considering how the winner was Oliver!, another high-octane epic based on an older story from a classic writer, Romeo and Juliet seemed like it would be the most appropriate competition for movie of the year status. Before we can get into that, however, probably the most groundbreakers were some of the pulpier movie genres. And, this time around, a few of them were actually nominated at the Academy Awards, which is commendable, but it also makes their losses seem even more puzzling.
        One of the biggest breakouts and films of the year was Mel Brooks’ comedic satire about show business, The Producers.

        Widely (and rightfully) considered one of the funniest movies ever made, The Producers is a watershed moment in the history of comedy filmmaking. The movie revolves around a sleazy, down-on-his-luck Broadway producer named Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) who discovers the beautiful art of fraud from whiny accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder). Eager to enter the high life, they concoct a scheme where they’ll lie to investors to fund the worst Broadway show of all time, thinking that the show will bomb and they’ll get to pocket the investments. In their quest to discover the worst script of all time (as well as the worst director, worst star etc.), the (clearly Jewish) pair settle on producing a white supremacist musical entitled Springtime for Hitler.
        It has been interesting seeing the transformation of comedies over the course of the 20th Century. Slapstick comedies were one of the best and most iconic forms of cinema during the Roaring 20s but were pretty decisively neutered with the rise of the Hays Code in the 30s. This in turn led to the drier and more double entendre-focused screwball comedies. While comedies had been steadily getting more and more risqué and more energetic since the end of McCarthyism, the risk was mostly coming from the characters challenging gender roles and willing to get hurt. The Producers was the first movie that was specifically designed to offend and challenge people’s ethnicities and values, by revolving around a protagonist who has virtually no redeeming qualities other than the fact that he’s a pathetic scumbag that we’re invited to laugh at. Over the course of the next 40 years, comedies would be mired in controversy as they deliberately poked fun at American values, sometimes to absolutely shocking degrees. Any movie and TV show that revels in this sort of challenge, an art form that arguably reached the limit with the dark sitcoms South Park (1997-present) and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present), likely draws a direct inspiration directly from The Producers. (I am obligated to mention that this type of comedy had been brewing for a while from comedians in the late 50s/60s like Lenny Bruce and Tom Lehrer but both of them were somewhat underground. Mel Brooks and The Producers was the first example of this being in a mainstream work.)
        Keep in mind that this movie came out only about 23 years after the end of WWII. Many survivors of the Holocaust and World War II would’ve been a predominant part of the moviegoing public at this time. To put this timeline in perspective, this would be like if a movie came out today that revolved around a Broadway producer making a musical about how great 9/11 was. (And to put in another perspective of how much this offensive humor became the norm in comedy up until recently, animated sitcom Family Guy (1999-present) did that exact thing… in 2008.) This was a serious assault on American cultural values in the late 60s, going even further than most other things that the counterculture was protesting at the time with its shameless use of ethnic humor.
        The reason why this works, however, is that The Producers is not endorsing this terrible ideology but, rather, making fun of it. Bialystock is a clearly, unapologetically terrible person, acting as a satire of the show business producer who will do absolutely anything to make money. Wilder’s Bloom, while a bit more innocent, is a basket case on the constant verge of a nervous breakdown. The neo-Nazi playwright (Kenneth Mars) they join forces with is portrayed as a deranged loser. Most of the movie is about Bialystock and Bloom putting the whole thing together and just about everyone they encounter is some parody or another of a self-righteous Broadway artist. The final climactic production of Springtime for Hitler is still one of the funniest things you’ll ever see with the ensuing comeuppance for our protagonists being one of the best movie twists of all time.
        Mel Brooks had his work cut out for him trying to get this movie funded and greenlit, as The Producers spent most of the 60s in development Hell since most real-life producers didn’t want to touch the thing with a ten-foot pole (one even asked Mel Brooks to make it about Springtime for Mussolini instead). The film was unsurprisingly controversial when it came out, though it quickly gained a lot of money through word-of-mouth. Yet, despite all this, the movie actually did get notice from the Academy. Gene Wilder was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Zero Mostel received no notice and was definitely snubbed as Bialystock is by far his most iconic role) and Mel Brooks actually won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a surprising and deserved honor.
        By contrast, the other biggest comedy of the year was The Odd Couple.

This movie is a much safer screwball about two friends (Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau) who move in together, with hijinx ensuing because one is much messier while the other is a clean freak. This was originally a Broadway play and it feels like it as most of the movie is portrayed in lazy long shots. As opposed to the manic insanity of The Producers, the jokes in The Odd Couple are more sort of the dry wits of yore. Still, the movie was a success, and even spawned a very beloved TV show (1970-1975) off of it.
        This movie was also nominated for Oscars (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing which… the first one comes down to taste but how the Hell did the second nomination happen?) but does come off as a very inferior movie to the groundbreaker that was The Producers. Between the two, The Producers was the only one that got nominated for an above-the-line award (Best Picture, Best Director, acting awards) so they did push the right one forward though, in terms of pushing movies forward, it might have warranted a few more nominations. But I digress. I went into the research for this blog fully expecting these movies to be completely snubbed but, instead, was surprised to learn that The Producers (and The Odd Couple) were nominated at all. So, this raises the question, when exactly did comedies become persona non grata at the Academy Awards? Questions for the future.
        The other chronically snubbed genre is horror but not this year. One of the surprising frontrunners was Roman Polanski’s Gothic drama, Rosemary’s Baby.

        Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) are a newlywed couple who move into a new apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in an attempt to try to settle down and have their first child. They’re given a warm welcome by their new neighbors, Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), who start seeming a little too friendly. Strange occurrences start happening after Rosemary becomes pregnant as she starts to suspect that the Castevets are not who they seem, they may have sinister plans for her unborn child and even that her child may, in fact, be the Antichrist.
        Similar to how The Producers completely altered the ball game for comedy, Rosemary’s Baby; along with later but equally influential films The Wicker Man (1973), The Exorcist (1974) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); is the demarcation point where modern horror begins. No longer would monsters be about the creepy supernatural creatures that go bump in the night. Instead, they would be focused on monsters who challenge or target the very things that we hold dear. In this case, pregnancy, especially a first one, is already a pretty challenging and tough thing to live through. But the idea that something evil might be growing inside of you is a very creepy and wicked idea.
        Furthermore, Rosemary’s Baby deliberately challenges American Christian sensibilities with its blunt and creepy talks of Satanism. Even though Universal movies would include spooks like vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters, for some reason, Satanism was a big no-no. In a far less secular world than today, the commentary in this movie truly frightened audiences, influencing a surge of horror pulp movies and novels directly talking about Satan and other Christian taboos. The Gothic look of Manhattan’s old buildings provides a modern take on classic Christian iconography, bringing classic and medieval themes into contemporary Americana.
        That’s the big reason why the movie landed with audiences. An underrated factor on why it still holds up, though, is its commentary on womanhood. Mia Farrow portrays a beautiful understated performance as a woman trying to hold it all together. Between her nosy neighbors, her casually abusive husband (who is an actor trying to make ends meet that clearly just sees his wife as an accessory which is an interesting commentary on counterculture relationships) and the terrible pregnancy that nobody really seems to care about, Rosemary’s Baby holds up a surprisingly progressive feminist tract.
        By today’s standards of horror movies, Rosemary’s Baby may feel a bit slow and isn’t overtly frightening (with the possible exception of one scene) but that’s also what makes it very effective. A lot of the frights exists below the surface and are more of a psychological study, which leaves more of an impact for a longer period of time If you're a horror junkie and think this starts off a bit too slow, keep watching it, you might be surprised by how much it stays with you after it's over.
        Rosemary's Baby was the biggest breakthrough in horror movies since... well, really anything up to this point. It was one of the year’s top grossers as audiences wanted to keep going again and again to experience the frights. It’s also a rare horror movie that was lauded by critics, with Film Daily (a magazine that aggregates critical reviews) aggregating it as the second-best movie of the year by most critics’ estimation (behind The Lion in Winter). Once again, it received acknowledgment by the Academy though it was scanter than it should have been. Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as the creepy yet imperious neighbor and the movie was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. No acknowledgment was given for Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes or Roman Polanski’s excellent directing job. Nor was the movie even nominated for Best Picture.
        (In case you’re wondering about the last acting Oscar, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor was Jack Albertson (who you probably best know as Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)) in The Subject Was Roses,

a now-forgotten drama about the generational gap that does get its thumb to the pulse of the times. Not as remembered as some other movies here, as it falls into the trap of feeling like a play still, but it’s a good watch and Albertson is indeed excellent in it.)
        The third major genre landmark was sci-fi movies as two of the most iconic and important science-fiction movies of all time came out in 1968. First was Planet of the Apes.

        We’ve discussed sci-fi before and how it had a big boom in the 1950s but was usually relegated to B-movie status and was never fully respected. Whether or not this was deserved is debatable and kind of the point of this blog series as there were some excellent films of the boom during the 50s (particularly Forbidden Planet (1956)) but they were admittedly few and far between in the colossal glut of teen crap, which made the good ones easy to ignore. Planet of the Apes, however, was so big that it simply couldn’t be ignored.
        The film revolves around a crew of astronauts, led by the nihilistic George Taylor (Charlton Heston), who crash-land on a mysterious planet where nature is upside down. Here, apes have evolved into the dominant species and have human-like speech and mannerisms while humans have devolved into simple, nonverbal creatures that are put in zoos or used as test subjects. Due to a throat injury during the landing, Taylor is rendered nonverbal and mistaken for one of the humans and put in with the rest of them. Despite being functionally mute, he still demonstrates signs of intelligence, signs that are decisively ignored by the apes as the idea of a human being able to talk would completely upend their social order.
        Despite the fun of the concept, one that would spawn a long-running franchise, Planet of the Apes is a very mean and uncompromising movie. Many previous sci-fi movies, such as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) or episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), tended to also use sci-fi as a prism to examine social commentary, with the thinking being that making the settings more fantastical made conservative audiences less likely to take offense. Planet of the Apes’ commentary is so blunt that it barely even qualifies as satire. The apes in the film are a clear commentary on the American government and society that just absolutely refuses to accept the fact that a human could be capable of speech. Even the few apes who do bond with Taylor are quickly relegated to the bottom of society for simply having the audacity to be curious enough to study and prove that a human can speak.
        The film is very well-paced, a good think piece and still holds up to this day, with the ending, even if it’s so famous that just about everyone knows it, still being a bit of a shock just because of how organically it steers us there. Admittedly, the costumes on the apes are a bit silly and fake-looking going back to them years later as you can practically see the seams on the prosthetics but, if you suspend your disbelief in this regard, Planet of the Apes is still a timeless allegory.
        The other great sci-fi movie of the year, and the greatest science-fiction movie ever made, was 2001: A Space Odyssey.

        While Planet of the Apes was high sci-fi in how it captured the sickness of society, 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the clearest example of what you could call high sci-fi in terms of portraying complex ideas that are almost beyond the normal bounds of comprehension. The film is basically a cross between a special effects extravaganza, an avant-garde think piece about the meaning of humanity and also a fun tech thriller all rolled into one. This is one of the most famous movies of filmmaking luminary, Stanley Kubrick, who went into this project with the specific goal of making what he considered the first truly great sci-fi movie.
        The plot takes place in the far-off futuristic year of 2001 (wasn’t it weird when all this happened that year?) as a mysterious monolith has been discovered on one of the moons of Jupiter. NASA dispatches a spacecraft called Discovery One with a crew of scientists to travel to Jupiter to discover this monolith and find out more about it. Also on board the vessel is an artificial intelligence computer named HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) who is designed to ensure the mission’s completion at all costs. Over the course of the flight, the lead astronauts, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), discover that HAL might be malfunctioning and may be misunderstanding what completing the mission actually entails.
        Now, I say that this chess match between the astronauts and HAL is the plot of the movie but, to be honest, this really only comprises probably about 40-45% of the actual film. The first 20% is a segment entitled the Dawn of Man where we see some half-human/half-ape creatures discover the same mysterious black monolith and how they first discovered problem-solving. The next 15-20% is showing life imagined in a spacefaring 21st Century. And the last 20% is the Discovery One entering a Stargate and… I don’t even know how the Hell to describe the rest of the final act of this movie and that is definitely by design.
        Just taking the segment of the movie with HAL on its own, 2001: A Space Odyssey would register a genuinely great thriller. HAL was the first, and one of the best, evil robots in cinematic history but there’s a lot more to distinguish him as a great character versus later creatures like the Terminator. For HAL, the only reason for existing is to accomplish the mission and if the mission is jeopardized then it is his job to ensure its success, no matter what it takes, even if it involves apologizing to Dave about how afraid he is that he can't do some things. Taken in conjunction with the Dawn of Man sequence, there is some commentary on what actually makes HAL human-like and even if this goal achievement through the usage of violence actually makes HAL even more human than machine. Douglas Rain is eerily good with his friendly monotone and red “eye” that sees all on the Discovery One becomes genuinely unnerving to look at before too long.
        The effects in this movie are also impressive, even decades later. You have to remember that this came out over 20 years before computer-generated imagery became commonplace and when you see some of the shots they had to get, you start understanding the level of creativity the effects team had cut out for them. For example, there’s the famous spacewalk sequence which was achieved by creating a gigantic centrifuge on set. Or the final sequence when Dave enters the stargate which contains this imagery. Again, this was not done by computers or any software but, instead, by an engineering trick of changing the camera’s aperture on a special jury-rigged device (it's very hard to describe so just check out this diagram instead). Only in a culture where people’s whose whole lives revolved around cameras would they be able to come up with something like that.
        If you go back and watch the classic sci-fi films of the 50s, as well as the TV shows like the original Star Trek (1966-1969), there was a bit of a fakeness to them. Even a movie like Forbidden Planet (1956), which was the closest you could come to high sci-fi before this, still looked like a set. It was a cool set but there was a suspension of disbelief on display. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first sci-fi movie that truly made you feel like you were in the far future in a spacefaring society. The sets, the costumes, it never glitches. You believe you’re on the Discovery One and the effects made to encompass a zero-gravity environment (or reverse-gravity or whatever have you) still seem so real. This movie is over 50 years old now and I still buy it.
        Even just taking it out of sci-fi, 2001: A Space Odyssey broke a lot of ground in some more technical aspects of filmmaking. Stanley Kubrick was a true master of the old adage, “show, don’t tell,” with his films deliberately eschewing easy-to-digest themes. This one goes even further than some of his later works as I think the first line of dialogue isn’t uttered until over 40 minutes into the film. And the first minute is a completely black screen of just listening to the majestic score, wondering what awaits you. (This music track is also notable as it was the first case of licensing pre-existing soundtracks specially for a movie; all of the music in 2001 are classical works, adding to the majesty of it all.)
        All of these elements combined into one movie really makes 2001: A Space Odyssey a true work of art that challenges the audience on the meaning of humanity: where we have been, where we are, where we’ll be and what will happen to us. Hell, some still debate whether 2001: A Space Odyssey is a darkly apocalyptic film or an inspirationally hopeful one. Unlike many other pretentious avant-garde pieces of the 60s, 2001: A Space Odyssey feels like it wants to have an open discussion with the audience about these complex ideals. The imagery is very thought-provoking and, still to this day, the film elicits numerous discussions by those who watch it… sometimes.
        On a meta level, 2001: A Space Odyssey actually showcases a generational gap in enjoyability and that gap kinda goes in both directions. At the time, older critics generally did not like and lambasted the movie, unfairly lumping it with other pretentious, navel-gazing crap like Empire (1966) and the like. Nowadays, viewers of our younger generation tend to not like it either, usually complaining about how they don’t “get” it. (Some critics also complained that the two scientists are played very monotonously making it hard to care about them which is a more fair complaint though it does add an interesting parallel between them and HAL 9000.) It was only the baby boomers who seemed to truly love 2001: A Space Odyssey. As much as we mock the hippie crowd here and how their lives revolved around their art at the expense of the world around them, this generation did more interesting things with art than any other generation. Only in 1968 would a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey actually rank as the second highest-grossing movie of the year. Audiences would watch it over and over again, trying to determine its meaning, wondering how these disparate stories all wove together and what they said about society. (And, also, because watching the Stargate sequence while tripping on acid must’ve been a next-level experience.)
        By the end of the year more and more critics would revise their opinions in a more positive tract, until, going into awards seasons, most agreed that Kubrick had accomplished his goal at creating what was arguably the greatest science-fiction movie of all time. So how did it fare with the almighty Academy? Well, it won a very well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects (the monkey suits on the prehistoric men being so good that some audiences actually thought they were specially trained gorillas). It was not nominated for Best Picture but did receive nominations for Best Director for Stanley Kubrick and Best Art Direction, both awards that it lost to Oliver!
        Ok, we’ve been holding this in long enough and I do want to reiterate that Oliver! is still a very good movie. In fact, it’s one of the best of the 60s musicals, probably just a tier or so down from West Side Story (1961) and Mary Poppins (1964). But good God, holy Christ on a cracker, putting it up against 2001: A Space Odyssey makes this one of the all time worst snubs in the history of the Academy Awards.
        After a year where the culture of Western society was a total inflection point and the generational gap had culminated into a full-on youthpocalypse, 2001: A Space Odyssey was offering a pensive take that invited the viewers to ruminate on the very destiny of humanity: where we came from, where we are, where we're going and what will eventually happen to us. Was violence always an innate part of us and does the very idea of technological advancement predicate more violence? And what about HAL? Where does he fit into all of this? This is one of the best examples of how movies can be art and it was given paltry acknowledgment. Plus, the one thing that united a very culturally divided country was the Space Race which would see its climax with Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon a mere 3 months after these awrads took place. 2001’s release was more timely than ever, firing up the imagination at the height of America’s journey into the stars.
        And, even if that was too highbrow for an organization that tries to pass it off as highbrow, Planet of the Apes and Romeo and Juliet offered elegant commentaries on the generational gap and how society’s elders are just beating their inferiors into submission instead of listening to them. Rosemary’s Baby and The Producers completely reinvented their respective genres as we know them while also offering some topical and timely commentary on feminism and the amorality of show business. Movies like Oliver! and Funny Girl (which was also nominated for Best Picture over 2001, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby and The Producers) didn’t really do anything new that musicals hadn’t done before. While I do give credit that a lot of these genre-heavy movies were at the very least nominated, it still seemed like the wrong movies were being focused on and winning the big awards.
        This isn’t just a latter-day critique observing this issue. Academy President Gregory Peck was genuinely disturbed by some of the fluffier choices being elevated by the Academy after how insane of a year 1968 was. So much so that he looked around and realized that the vast majority of Academy membership was, on average, in their 60s or older. As a result, he encouraged the retirement of numerous members and started stacking the Academy with more and more of the New Hollywood crowd. This shuffling of the guard officially cemented that New Hollywood was here to stay as they completely conquered the most hallowed of Hollywood institutions so they can now bestow the almighty Hollywood award upon their choices.
        Ideally, that should’ve been the end of this show as Oliver!’s victory actually killed a lot of the Academy’s credibility for a few years, believe it or not. Sadly, that wasn’t the case as New Hollywood was every bit as awards-obsessed as the Old (if not more so) but we’ll get to how that generation ended up making wrong choices in due time.
        For now, while some of the side-awards were good choices, the big two should come as no surprise as to where we’re going with this. Again Oliver! is a very good movie and the only reason why it invites this discourse is because someone actually decreed it as being better than 2001: A Space Odyssey. On its own merits, it is excellent. But in terms of pushing the envelope, revolutionizing cinematic arts and reflecting the times back at the audience? Calling Oliver! the best movie (and best directing job) of 1968 was a…


SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1968:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
• Belle de Jour (dir. Luis Buñuel)
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (dir. Ken Hughes)
• Hang 'Em High (dir. Ted Post)
• Monterey Pop (dir. D. A. Pennebaker)
• Oliver! (dir. Carol Reed)
• Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Shaffner)
• Romeo and Juliet (dir. Franco Zeffirelli)
• Rosemary's Baby (dir. Roman Polanski)
• The Producers (dir. Mel Brooks) 
• The Subject Was Roses (dir. Ulu Grosbard) 

Favorite Heroes:

• Ben (Duane Jones) (Night of the Living Dead)
• Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
• Corporal Timmy Cleary (Martin Sheen) (The Subject Was Roses)
• Deputy Marshal Jedediah Cooper (Clint Eastwood) (Hang 'Em High)
• Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand) (Funny Girl)
• George Taylor (Charlton Heston) (Planet of the Apes)
• Nancy (Shani Wallis) (Oliver!) 
• Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn) (The Lion in Winter)
• Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) (Rosemary's Baby)
• Sévérine Serizy (Brigitte Parmentier as a baby, Dominique Dandrieux as a child, Catherine Deneuve as an adult) (Belle de Jour) 

Favorite Villains:

• Baron Bomburst (Gert Fröbe) (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
• Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) (Oliver!)
• Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) (Planet of the Apes)
• Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars) (The Producers)
• Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) (Rosemary's Baby) 
• HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) (2001: A Space Odyssey)
• John Cleary (Jack Albertson) (The Subject Was Roses)
• Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) (The Producers)
• Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon) (Rosemary's Baby)
• The Child-Catcher (Robert Helpmann) (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)