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1960
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
BURT LANCASTER in "Elmer Gantry",
Trevor Howard in "Sons and Lovers", Jack Lemmon in "The
Apartment", Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer",
Spencer Tracy in "Inherit the Wind"
Actress:
ELIZABETH TAYLOR in "Butterfield 8", Greer Garson in "Sunrise
at Campobello", Deborah Kerr in "The Sundowners",
Shirley MacLaine in "The Apartment",
Melina Mercouri in "Never on Sunday"
Supporting Actor:
PETER USTINOV in "Spartacus", Peter Falk in "Murder,
Inc.", Jack Kruschen in "The Apartment",
Sal Mineo in "Exodus", Chill Wills in "The Alamo"
Supporting Actress:
SHIRLEY JONES in "Elmer Gantry",
Glynis Johns in "The Sundowners", Shirley Knight in "The
Dark at the Top of the Stairs", Janet Leigh in  "Psycho",
Mary Ure in "Sons and Lovers"
Director:
BILLY WILDER for "The Apartment",
Jack Cardiff for "Sons and Lovers", Jules Dassin for "Never
on Sunday", Alfred Hitchcock for "Psycho",
Fred Zinnemann for "The Sundowners"
 The
Best Picture Award winner was director/producer/writer Billy
Wilder's cynical and risque black and white comedy/tragi-drama The
Apartment (with a total of ten nominations and five
wins - Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing: Story
and Screenplay, Best B/W Art Direction, and Best Film Editing).
It was an indictment of corporate politics. It told about an
ambitious, lonely insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) who lends out
his NY apartment to higher executives for their clandestine,
illicit affairs. His married boss's (Fred MacMurray) girlfriend
and elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) is so depressed about
her own involvement that she attempts suicide.
Wilder's Some Like It
Hot (1959) was mostly overlooked the previous year,
so the Academy made up for the oversight this year. [It
was an unprecedented triple win for Wilder - three Oscars
for co-writing, producing, and directing the same film.
The last time a triple win had occurred was director Leo
McCarey's win for Going My Way (1944), but in 1944,
the Best Picture award wasn't yet given to individual producers.
It would also occur for Francis Ford Coppola in 1974, James
L. Brooks in 1983, and James Cameron in 1997.] It was remarkable
that none of the three nominated members of the
acting cast (Lemmon, MacLaine, or Kruschen) of the Best
Picture winner won an Oscar.
The other Best Picture nominees in 1960 were
mostly a mixed bag:
- producer/director/actor John Wayne's overlong,
big-budget, turgid American epic about the 1836 battle for
independence, The Alamo (with a total of seven nominations
and only one win - Best Sound) - Wayne had tirelessly campaigned
for the tepid film, suggesting with ads that it would be
unpatriotric not to vote for the film - "the most expensive
picture ever made on American soil"
- writer/director Richard Brooks' Elmer
Gantry (with five nominations and three wins
- Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Screenplay)
that was based on Sinclair Lewis' expose novel about
disreputable and fraudulent small-town evangelists
- a film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's autobiographical
novel by director Jack Cardiff, Sons and Lovers (with
six nominations and one win - Best B/W Cinematography)
- director Fred Zinnemann's film of an Irish
sheep-herding family in Australia during the 1920s from Jon
Cleary's novel, The Sundowners (with five nominations
and no wins)
The Best Director nominees Alfred Hitchcock (for Psycho -
this was the famed director's fifth and last unsuccessful nomination
in this category) and Jules Dassin (for Never On Sunday -
this was his sole Best Director nomination) replaced Best Picture-nominated
directors John Wayne (for The Alamo) and Richard Brooks
(for Elmer Gantry) in that category.
Burt Lancaster (with his second nomination and
sole Oscar win) won the Best Actor Award for the title role
in Elmer Gantry - a 1920s charismatic,
phony, silver-tongued, amoral, spellbinding, grinning and womanizing
Bible Belt evangelist who becomes attracted to a revivalist
(un-nominated Jean Simmons) and her traveling troupe. [This
was the only Oscar win for Lancaster out of a total
of four career nominations - other nominations were for From
Here to Eternity (1953), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962),
and Atlantic City (1981).]
Other Best Actor nominees included:
- Jack Lemmon (with his third of eight career
nominations) as lonely, ambitious and young New York insurance
clerk C. C. Baxter who loans out his Manhattan apartment
for romantic trysts for his company's executive supervisors
while falling in love with the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine)
- one of the victims, in The Apartment
- Laurence Olivier (with his sixth of ten career
nominations) as seedy vaudevillian performer Archie Rice
in director Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (the
film's sole nominaton)
- Spencer Tracy (with his seventh of nine
career nominations) as a "Clarence Darrow-style" trial
lawyer named Henry Drummond opposite prosecutor Matthew Harrison
Brady (unnominated Fredric March as Biblical literalist William
Jennings Bryan) in director Stanley Kramer's fictionalized
dramatization of the 1925 Tennessee Scopes "Monkey Trial", Inherit
the Wind (with four nominations and no wins)
- Trevor Howard (with his sole career nomination)
as D. H. Lawrence's drunken, coal-mining father Walter Morel
in Sons and Lovers
The Best Actress category (with two prostitutes
and a mistress among the nominees) was won by Elizabeth Taylor
(with her fourth of four consecutive nominations and
her first Oscar win) as part-time model and wanton,
fast-living, disturbed call-girl Gloria Wandrous caught in
a doomed romance with a wealthy married man (Laurence Harvey)
and her love for her disapproving friend (Eddie Fisher) in
the trashy Daniel Mann film based on John O'Hara's novel, Butterfield
8 (with two nominations and one win - Best Actress). The
title of the picture was derived from her answering services'
telephone exchange - Butterfield. Violet-eyed Taylor's win
for the widely-panned melodramatic film is often interpreted
as a sympathy vote because she had lost in the three previous
years, and she had just endured an emergency tracheotomy during
a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, and had throat scars to prove
it.
The defeated Best Actress nominees included well-deserving
actresses:
- Deborah Kerr (with her sixth and last unsuccessful
career nomination) for her role as Ida Carmody, a sheepherder
in Australia married to Robert Mitchum in director Fred Zinnemann's The
Sundowners
- Greer Garson (with her seventh and final Best
Actress career nomination) for her role as Eleanor Roosevelt
(opposite unnominated Ralph Bellamy as FDR) in the story
of Franklin D. Roosevelt's life and presidency, in director
Vincent J. Donahue's Sunrise at Campobello
- Greek-born Melina Mercouri (with her sole
career nomination) as Ilya - an uneducated, fun-loving Greek
prostitute in writer/director Jules Dassin's Never on
Sunday (with five nominations and one win - Best Song)
- Mercouri's first major successful international film
- Shirley MacLaine (with her second of five
career nominations) as Fran Kubelik - the insurance company's
depressed, quirky elevator girl who is seduced by Jack Lemmon's
married boss Fred MacMurray and subsequently attempts suicide
in The Apartment
London-born Peter Ustinov (with his second of
three career nominations - and his first of two Oscar wins
- he was previously nominated for his supporting role in a
similar epic Quo Vadis? (1951) ) won the Best Supporting
Actor award as a wily, greedy Roman slave trader-master Lentulus
Batiatus who trains Kirk Douglas in a gladiator school in Stanley
Kubrick's tale of a slave revolt, Spartacus (with six
nominations and four wins - Best Supporting Actor, Best Color
Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction/Set Decoration, and
Best Color Costume Design).
Other Best Supporting Actor nominees were:
- Peter Falk (with his first of two unsuccessful
career nominations) as Abe Reles - a 1930s hired killer in Murder,
Inc. (the film's sole nomination)
- Jack Kruschen (with his sole nomination) as
Dr. Dreyfuss - Jack Lemmon's next-door neighbor who helps
save co-star Shirley MacLaine from suicide in The
Apartment
- Sal Mineo (with his second and last unsuccessful
career nomination) as Zionist terrorist Dov Landau in director
Otto Preminger's version of Leon Uris' best-selling novel Exodus (with
three nominations and one win - Best Dramatic Score)
- Chill Wills (with his sole nomination) as
the 'beekeeper' in The Alamo. [Wills might have won,
except that he vigorously campaigned for his own nomination
- a dubious one at best - and had aggressively hired a publicist
for his campaign. He put an ad in the trade papers declaring
to all Academy members: "Win, lose, or draw, you're
still all my cousins, and I love you," and signed it "Your
cousin, Chill Wills."
Another of Wills' ads suggested that the film's cast was praying
for a Wills victory "harder than the real Texans prayed
for their lives at the Alamo." The tactic seemingly backfired.]
The Best Supporting Actress award went to Shirley
Jones (with her sole career nomination) and her against-type
role as blonde Lulu Bains - Burt Lancaster's former dishevelled
girlfriend/turned hustling, blackmailing prostitute who seeks
revenge in Elmer Gantry. [She
is best known for playing the mother on the TV show The
Partridge Family in the early 70s.]
Other Best Supporting Actress competitors included:
- Janet Leigh (with her sole career nomination)
for her role as Marion Crane - a money thief stabbed to death
in the Bates Motel in an unforgettable shower scene in director
Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated horror film Psycho
- Glynis Johns (with her sole nomination) as
Mrs. Firth - the Cockney, Australian barmaid/innkeeper in The
Sundowners
- Shirley Knight (with her first of two unsuccessful
career nomination) as Reenie - a shy 1920s Oklahoman daughter
(of salesman Robert Preston) in director Delbert Mann's film
of William Inge's screenplay, The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs (the film's sole nomination)
- Mary Ure (with her sole nomination) as sexually-emancipated
Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers
The Honorary Oscar award was awarded to a gravely-ill
Gary Cooper this year,
"for his many memorable screen performances and the international
recognition he, as an individual, has gained for the motion picture
industry." He had received five Best Actor nominations in
his career from 1936 to 1952, and won two Oscars - Sergeant
York (1941) and High
Noon (1952). Cooper died a month after the awards ceremony
(April 17, 1961), on May 13, 1961. Stan Laurel also received
an Honorary award for
"his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy."
In this year, Hayley Mills was the last recipient
of the outstanding juvenile Honorary award (a miniature statuette),
for Pollyanna - an honor that first began as a tribute
to Shirley Temple in 1934. From now on, child performers would
be included among the regular competitive awards. [The first
nominated child star nominees were Jackie Cooper for Skippy
(1930/31), and Patty McCormack for The Bad Seed (1956).
The first winning child star was 16 year old Patty Duke for The
Miracle Worker (1962).]
Oscar Anomalies:
Janet Leigh received only one Oscar nomination
in her career, for Psycho -
which she lost! Other memorable unnominated roles included
her role as Charlton Heston's terrorized wife Susan Vargas
in Orson Welles' Touch
Of Evil (1958) or as Rosie, Frank Sinatra's love interest
in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian
Candidate (1962). Likewise, 1960 was the year for Trevor
Howard's sole nomination in a career with many outstanding
but un-nominated acting roles, such as in Brief
Encounter (1946) and The
Third Man (1949).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
It was appalling that Best Picture-nominated The
Alamo edged out Hitchcock's superior thriller Psycho (with
four unsuccessful nominations) and Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus for
Best Picture nominations. This was Hitchcock's fifth nomination
as director (from 1940-1960) - he would never be nominated
again for Best Director.
Two other omissions for Psycho must
be noted:
- the famous, recognizable score by Bernard
Herrmann
- Anthony Perkins in his most famous role as
the twitchy, schizophrenic, and chilling mother-obsessed
Bates Motel manager/serial killer psycho Norman Bates
[Note: Perkins received only one nomination in his entire career
- for Friendly Persuasion (1956).]
Both Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet were denied
nominations as TVA agent Chuck Glover and as evicted 80 year
old widow Ella Garth in Elia Kazan's issue-oriented drama Wild
River, and Alec Guinness was likewise ignored in the nominees
as brutal and crude Lt. Col. Jock Sinclair in director Ronald
Neame's Tunes of Glory. Fredric March was neglected
for his performance as Matthew Harrison Brady opposite nominated
Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.
And Doris Day was omitted as a Best Actress nominee for one
of her few (and last) dramatic roles as the hysterical and
threatened Kit Preston in the Hitchcock-like mystery thriller Midnight
Lace (with only one nomination for Best Costume Design).
Jean Simmons, who played Varinia - a slave girl
loved by Spartacus, was denied a nomination (opposite the powerhouse
performance of Best Actor-winning Burt Lancaster) for her part
as devout evangelist Sister Sharon in Elmer
Gantry - the film also lacked a nomination for its
first-time director Richard Brooks.
And Ralph Bellamy, recreating his Tony Award-winning
role of FDR opposite nominated Greer Garson was denied a nomination
in Sunrise at Campobello. Robert Mitchum was not a nominee
for his role as Paddy Carmody in The Sundowners (1960).
[Throughout his entire career, he received only one nomination,
a supporting one for his performance in the war film The
Story of G.I. Joe (1945).]
Director Otto Preminger effectively ended the
blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo, by putting the writer's real
name on the screenplay for Exodus. (Trumbo, under the
pseudonym of Robert Rich, won the Best Writing: Original Story
Award (his second and last nomination and sole Oscar win) for The
Brave One (1956).) And finally, why wasn't Fred
MacMurray nominated in a supporting role as a cad businessman
in The Apartment instead of
Jack Kruschen?
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