A history of Oscar controversies

On HotPress.com, we have covered the controversy surrounding Irish director Vincent Lambe’s Oscar-nominated short, Detainment. The 30-minute film is based around the infamous 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger, by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

Detainment uses actors to recreate some of Venables and Thompson’s police interviews, including part of their confession. The script quotes the police transcripts verbatim. The film also recreates parts of the day that Bulger was murdered, showing Venables and Thompson leading the toddler away from the Strand shopping centre and down to the railway station, though none of the violence is shown.

Lambe never consulted with Bulger’s family about the film, nor warned them that it was being screened at festivals and submitted for award contention – a fact that James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, has found unforgivable.

Fergus has appealed to the Academy not to honour or reward the film, and a petition to remove the film from Oscar contention has received over 240,000 signatures.

The controversy raised questions over whether it was even possible for a film to be removed from Oscar contention – and indeed, revoked Oscar nominations are as old as the awards ceremony itself.

At the very first Academy Awards in 1929, Charlie Chaplin received four nominations for The Circus: Best Actor, Best Writer, Best Comedy Director and Outstanding Picture. Fearing that Chaplin would sweep the boards and monopolise the entire ceremony, the Academy revoked his individual nominations and instead presented him with a special Honorary Award, encapsulating the overall quality of his work on The Circus.

Oscar nominations have also been revoked when the film in question was shown in cinemas or on television before or after the eligibility dates, as was the case with the 2012 Norwegian short film, Tuba Atlantic. In 1969, The Young Americans actually won Best Documentary, only to have award revoked a month after the ceremony, when the Academy discovered it had been shown in a theatre in 1967, rendering it ineligible. Journey Into The Self was belatedly given the Best Documentary award instead. It is the only film in Oscar history to win an award, only to have it revoked after the ceremony.

Nominations have also been revoked on the basis of originality standards. The 1954 John Wayne western Hondo was nominated for Best Story, but later disqualified when it was discovered that the script was actually based on a short story, The Gift Of Cochise. The Godfather composer Nino Rota also had his Best Original Dramatic Score nomination revoked when it was discovered that he had re-used some of his own score from the 1958 Italian comedy Fortunella.

Finally, when Marlon Brando won Best Actor for his role in The Godfather in 1973, he famously refused to accept his statue, instead sending an Indigenous activist, Sacheen Littlefeather, onstage to announce that the actor “very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry."

Brando released a letter to the press expanding upon his reasoning, stating, “The motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile, and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children ... see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.”

Brando’s controversial rejection of an Oscar has never been repeated, but proved that new precedents can always be set.