Tag: Academy Awards

Boomers Watch as the Oscar Goes to…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been awarding Oscars since 1929, long before Baby Boomers were on the scene. Yet as the first television generation, we grew up along with the Oscars as the film industry embraced television for their own purposes. The first televised Academy Awards was in 1953, placing it smack-dab into the Baby Boomer era. The first telecast in color happened in 1966, and the first international broadcast occurred in 1969.

As Mister Boomer pondered his own involvement with watching the Academy Awards telecasts, he wondered what was happening 60 years ago, which was about the time he was even remotely interested in the annual broadcast and would have seen some of the nominated pictures.

It was April 5, 1965 when the 37th Annual Academy Awards, hosted by Bob Hope (which he did 14 times on TV and another 5 before it was televised) was broadcast live from Santa Monica Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. In historical context, Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States, and he had delivered his “Great Society” speech in January of 1965. One week before the Oscar telecast he ordered the first combat troops into Vietnam. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each held nuclear tests within weeks of the telecast. Martin Luther King Jr. led the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in the previous month, which is portrayed in a movie nominated for the 2015 awards. In New York, Malcolm X was assassinated that February.

On the music scene the British Invasion was well underway with The Beatles topping the charts, The Who making their first TV appearances, and The Rolling Stones establishing themselves as international stars. It was The Beatles, however, who caused the first ripples in the film industry. A Hard Day’s Night was released in 1964, which made the Richard Lester film eligible for the awards, to say nothing of bringing Baby Boomers into theaters. Nonetheless, in the true fashion of a still-conservative Academy, the innovative movie was snubbed except for a Best Story and Screenplay nomination (Alun Owen) and a Best Score nomination (George Martin). None of the film’s songs by The Beatles were nominated. Today the flick is considered one of the top 100 films of all time. Besides an affront to the growing groundswell of rock ‘n roll, to this day the Academy rarely acknowledges comedies in top categories.

Against this backdrop of tension, war, the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of a Younger Generation (and their music and films), the Academy celebrated the best in their field for 1964. Best picture nominees were My Fair Lady; Becket; Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; Mary Poppins; and Zorba the Greek. The Oscar went to My Fair Lady.

From the first time Mister Boomer saw Dr. Strangelove, it became one of his all-time favorite movies.

In an ironic twist, My Fair Lady gave its star, Rex Harrison, the Oscar for Best Actor, and George Cukor won for Best Director, but its female star, Audrey Hepburn, was not nominated. Some said it was because she did not perform her own singing in the film — that was the voice of Marni Nixon. Others were still bristling from the news that Julie Andrews did not get the role. Andrews had originated the role on Broadway and performed it alongside Rex Harrison for two years before the film was made … and she did her own singing. To add irony on top of irony, Julie Andrews made her American motion picture debut that year in Mary Poppins. She not only sang as part of her role, but won the Best Actress award.

It was an amazing year for what we now consider classic American cinema, starring some of the biggest names in Hollywood at that time. Many were nominated in other categories, including Sophia Loren (Marriage Italian Style); Anne Bancroft (The Pumpkin Eater); Debbie Reynolds (The Unsinkable Molly Brown); Agnes Moorehead (Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte); and Grayson Hall (Night of the Iguana). Notable males included Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Richard Burton (Becket); Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove); Peter Ustinov (Topkapi); Anthony Quinn (Zorba the Greek); and Edmond O’Brien (Seven Days in May).

The 37th Annual Academy Awards was also noted for presenting all the top acting awards to foreign-born actors: Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady), Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins), Peter Ustinov (Topkapi) and Lila Kedrova (Zorba the Greek). This has only happened one other time in Academy Awards history, in 2007.

The slow pace of the ceremonies and ever-present face of Bob Hope were reasons Mister B wasn’t keen on sitting in the living room with his family to watch the annual broadcasts in their entirety. He regularly backed off to his room to deal with homework. Nonetheless, the family’s TV was always tuned in every year.

What was your families’ interest in the Academy Awards TV broadcast, boomers?

Please note: This is an edited version of a post first published by Mister Boomer on February 22, 2015.

Boomers Occasionally Heard the Name “Oscar”

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has once again awarded Oscars for outstanding work in a wide variety of categories in film in its annual telecast. Mister Boomer has written some interesting tidbits about Academy Award presentations during the boomer years (see Boomers Watch as the Oscar Goes to… and Boomers Saw Great Movies Win Oscars), so he was not all that enthused about another post along those lines. Instead, he wondered about the actual name, “Oscar.” He wasn’t concerned about the statue, but the name itself.

There were very few boomer boys named Oscar, but boomers knew the name. Etymology of the male name have been traced to Irish, English and Norse origins. The name was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, and reached its popularity around 1890. With the exception of Sweden (where it remains a popular name since two of the country’s kings were named Oskar), the number of males named Oscar worldwide has steadily declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. During the boomer years in the United States, less than half of one percent of boys were named Oscar. There was a slight uptick in the early 2000s, but that trend has not held in recent years.

So, how did boomers know the name, “Oscar?” Who were some of the famous Oscars that boomers knew in their time?

Oscar Hammerstein was a composer, producer and director who worked in musical theater as well as movies. Together with his writing partner, Richard Rogers, the duo wrote the music for Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music. If boomers did not see a live musical that Hammerstein developed, they certainly saw the movies made after the plays. In fact, Hammerstein is the only Oscar to have won an Oscar — and he won two of them. What may be of interest to boomers, however, is that he did not win an Oscar for what may be the best known of his movie scores among boomers: The Sound of Music. However, he did win a Grammy for the original cast album of the Broadway musical, and a Tony award for that theatrical presentation. Hammerstein’s presence was certainly known to the parents of boomers, and therefore seeped down to their boomer children in the form of show tune albums being played in the house, and later, the movies themselves running on television. Hammerstein died in 1960.

Born in Montreal, Canada in 1925, Oscar Peterson was a famous jazz pianist. If boomer parents were into jazz in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, their boomer children probably heard his records played at home. Today he is considered one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. He continued to perform sporadically after he had a stroke in 1993, ultimately passing way in 2007.

Boomers got to know the work of Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) in the 1960s. He was the head in-house designer for Elizabeth Arden in New York, before moving to Jane Derby in 1965. He bought the company after Derby died in 1969, and changed the name to his own label. Boomers may very well have seen prominent women wearing his fashions in Life, Look and other magazines of the age. His long association with creating dresses for First Ladies started when he designed a dress for Jackie Kennedy when she accompanied her husband on an official visit to India. He continued to create dresses and gowns for Jackie, then went on to dress Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. Oscar de la Renta launched his own fragrance, named OSCAR, in 1977, and branched out into sunglasses and designer eyewear a year later.

Oscar F. Mayer (1859-1955) was the real person behind Oscar Mayer meats. His son, Oscar G. Mayer (1914-2009), took over the family business after his father’s death. He continued running the family business until it was bought by General Foods in 1981 (Kraft is the current owner). Oscar G. is credited with expanding the company’s exposure by reviving the Wienermobile, which his father had introduced in 1939, and sponsoring the company’s famous commercials of the boomer era. Is there a boomer anywhere who can’t sing the commercial jingles for bologna and hot dogs from the 1960s and ’70s?

Oscar Madison was a character in The Odd Couple, which began as a Broadway play by Neil Simon (1965), then became a film (1968) before becoming a TV series (1970-75). Walter Matthau portrayed Oscar in the film (opposite Jack Lemmon as Felix Unger), and the TV incarnation of Oscar was played by Jack Klugman (opposite Tony Randall as Felix).

Oscar the Grouch appeared in the very first episode of Sesame Street in 1969. Boomers young and old may recall Oscar as the Muppet who lived in a trash can, created by Jim Henson and Jon Stone. The first Oscar was orange, but later he was changed to green.

Meanwhile, back at The Academy Awards, the statue awarded by The Academy is nicknamed Oscar. The origin of how it got its nickname is disputed by some, but the most widely accepted story is that it was first said by a woman who worked for The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1939, Margaret Herrick was a librarian there. She established the first library records of films for the organization. The story goes that Margaret, upon seeing the statue, remarked that it looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck. After Herrick’s retirement in 1971, the Academy renamed their collections library after her. Today, the Margaret Herrick Library holds more than 80,000 screenplays, plus tens of thousands of movie posters and press clippings, plus millions of publicity photographs.

Does the name “Oscar” bring back any memories for you, boomers?