As Hollywood's oldest and most prestigious award ceremony, the Academy Awards have had their fair share of memorable moments over the years. However, some ceremonies are remembered for less than ideal reasons:
- The first really big politically-charged moment happened at the 45th awards in 1973, when Marlon Brando sent actress/model/activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline the Best Actor statuette along with a 15-page speech (which producers refused to let her read, limiting her time to sixty seconds) condemning the plight of Native Americans and Hollywood's treatment of them.note Littlefeather's appearance drew a combination of applause, boos and Stunned Silence from the audience. Raquel Welch (co-presenting Best Actress) voiced the hope that no one else would try to make a statement that night, while Clint Eastwood (presenting Best Picture) made a stilted joke about presenting "on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years."note The incident was brought back to the spotlight in 2022 following four incidents: the Will Smith/Chris Rock slap (prompting mention of previous notorious Oscar moments), the Academy issuing a formal apology to Littlefeather for her treatment at the show in June, Littlefeather's own death in October, and subsequent scrutiny over the background of Littlefeather, who'd been born Maria Louise Cruz and claimed Yaqui and White Mountain Apache ancestry through her father Manuel Cruz (her mother was of European descent). A Navajo writer and activist interviewed Littlefeather's two sisters later the same month, and they told her Littlefeather fabricated her Native American ancestry, saying their father is of Spanish-Mexican descent and has no tribal ties.
- The 46th Academy Awardsnote are infamously known
for a man named Robert Opel streaking across the stage and the hilarious off-the-cuff response to it from host David Niven, which was received with rapturous applause from the audience.David Niven: Ladies and gentlemen, that was always bound to happen. (visibly struggling not to laugh) But isn't it fascinating that... fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings? - When Hearts and Minds won Best Documentary Feature just weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975, producer Bert Schneider's acceptance speech included his reading a telegram sent by a Viet Cong leader to "Our friends in America." Bob Hope, hopping mad over this, urged the show's producers to make an announcement distancing the Oscars from political comments made by winners, which was read on-air by Frank Sinatra.
- Vanessa Redgrave's Supporting Actress nomination for Julia garnered controversy before the awards, because of her advocacy for Palestinian causes. When she won, she criticized "Zionist hoodlums" in her speech, which drew boos from the audience. Again, another presenter came out later and lamented the use of the Oscars as a political platform, in this case screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (who, himself being Jewish, was throughly displeased with Redgrave's actions).
- The 1989 ceremony, despite having one of the widest-ranging and starry presenter lineups imaginable for its time, the most popular Best Picture winner in years, the rare feat of one of the night's winners also serving as a presenter (Geena Davis, who won her Supporting Actress award for The Accidental Tourist before co-presenting Documentary Short Subject), and memorable comedy bits from (among others) Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, was completely sunk by the extreme Camp of the 10-minute-plus "Snow White goes to Hollywood" opening sequence and "I Wanna Be an Oscar Winner" later, leading several major Hollywood creatives headed up by Blake Edwards to take out an ad saying the show was an insult to the American film industry, and the Walt Disney Company attempting a lawsuit over the unauthorized use of their version of Snow White. The general critical reception was so poor that the show was completely overhauled the next year, and Crystal was tapped by new producer Gilbert Cates to host the 1990 ceremony largely because he was so frequently pointed to as a highlight in '89.
- For many years, the 65th Academy Awardsnote were infamous for the rumors that Marisa Tomei winning the award for Best Supporting Actress in My Cousin Vinny was a mistake made by presenter Jack Palance, with the Academy denying the allegations, saying that they would've immediately intervened if it was wrong. These allegations were finally put to rest after the Best Picture mixup at the 89th Academy Awards ceremony.
- Elia Kazan's Lifetime Achievement award in 1999 drew protesters to the awards and dozens of conspicuous non-applauders in the audience (most prominently Nick Nolte and Ed Harris), because of his actions during The Hollywood Blacklist era.
- The 75th Academy Awardsnote was the one where Roman Polański won Best Director for The Pianist, but the #MeToo movement fifteen years later led many to view it as one of the Academy's worst mistakes, as Polański is a convicted sex offender and a fugitive from justice and is regarded as one of the go-to examples of fans forgiving serious crimes if they're committed by a celebrity they like. In contrast to Kazan's award, the absent Polanski got a standing ovation from those in attendance, which came back to haunt many of them with the rise of the #MeToo movement over a decade later (particularly Meryl Streep).
- The 78th Academy Awardsnote are remembered for the controversial awarding of Best Picture to Crash instead of Brokeback Mountain, with critics accusing the Academy voters of getting cold feet from awarding an LGBT-themed film. (Jack Nicholson, who presented the award, was visibly flustered as he announced that Crash had won.)
- The 87th and 88th Academy Awardsnote gained more attention for the troubles over the issue of racial diversity amongst the acting nominees (as they were all white) and online protests and planned boycotts that ensued in response than the actual nominations. All of this ended up becoming the butt of many, many jokes by the latter ceremony's host, Chris Rock. On the bright side, at least Leonardo DiCaprio finally got an Oscar.
- The 89th Academy Awardsnote attracted several notable controversies:
- Casey Affleck's Best Actor win for Manchester by the Sea was controversial due to the revelation weeks before the ceremony that Affleck had been sued for sexual harassment in 2010,note to the point that several attendees of the awards, up to and including the actress who presented him the award, the previous year's Best Actress winner Brie Larson, refused to applaud him on his win. Affleck went on to decline the traditional presentation of the Best Actress award the following year, knowing full well the reaction it would get. (Not helping matters is that the #MeToo movement began inbetween the two ceremonies.)
- The Iranian film The Salesman, which won Best Foreign Language Film, became better known for the fact that its director Asghar Farhadi boycotted the ceremony in protest of President Donald Trump's controversial executive order temporarily suspending immigration from his and six other Muslim-majority countries, in which he compared the situation to the hard-liners in Iran. Iranian-American astronaut Anousheh Ansari picked up the award for him.
- The last and biggest controversy came at the ceremony's end, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously announced that La La Land won Best Picture instead of Moonlight, the actual winner, the first time this mistake had been made in the Awards' history. The error, resulting from Beatty being mistakenly handed a backup envelope for Best Actress, which La La Land had in fact won, rapidly became the defining moment of the ceremony in pop culture. They were invited back to announce the following year's Best Picture winner to show there were no hard feelings, as everyone immediately agreed that they were in no way at fault. If anything, the event made the rumors Marisa Tomei winning the award for Best Supporting Actress in 1992 dispelled.
- The 91st Academy Awardsnote fell under controversy before it even started:
- Kevin Hart, who was set to host, stepped down after a series of homophobic tweets from 2010 and 2011 were unearthed. Such tweets included Hart using the terms "gay" and "fag" in a derogatory manner and threatening to smash a dollhouse over his son's head if he was caught playing with one. He was also criticized for not apologizing until the day after the tweets were discovered. Though some people did support Hart, including lesbian Ellen DeGeneres, he ultimately stuck with his initial decision. Even worse, Hart was a last-ditch choice by the Academy, a sign of desperation on its part, especially after the whole #OscarsSoWhite debacle. Viewers immediately brought up the spectre of what happened the last time the Oscars didn't have a host — to wit, the show opened with a disastrous musical number that ruined the careers of everyone involved — and declared the ceremony cursed from the start.
- To shorten the ceremony's broadcasting hours, the Academy decided to have four categories (Best Cinematography, Best Short Live-Action Film, Best Film Editing, and Best Make-Up and Hairstyling) presented during commercial breaks and streamed online, with their acceptance speeches replayed during the broadcast. The Oscar nominees under these affected categories and other filmmakers were infuriated with this decision. The president of the American Society of Cinematographers expressed disappointment, explaining that filmmaking is a collaborative effort and that not acknowledging these categories feels like a separation from the filmmaking process. The Academy bowed to the pressure after a few days and agreed to fully air all the awards. (Sadly, four years later, the Academy actually went through with removing eight categories from the broadcast, to similar outcry and not managing to significantly shorten the ceremony.)
- The Academy also toyed with creating a "Best Popular Film" category, which was roundly criticized throughout the industry as a condescending fake award to let them pander to more populist leanings and get the awards' ratings to stop slipping. This view was cemented when the Academy was unable to give a straight answer as to what exactly would constitute inclusion in the category, as opposed to Best Picture. In the end, the category was not instituted, and the one film which arguably everyone agreed would have received a nomination for it, Black Panther, stayed in Best Picture.
- The 93rd Academy Awardsnote received massive criticism for its conclusion, which involved the schedule flip of announcing the Best Actor winner after Best Picture, which normally closes the evening: It became clear that the entire thing was structured around the assumption that Chadwick Boseman would receive a posthumous win for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, complete with Boseman's widow attending the cremony, ostensibly to accept the award on his behalf. The problem was, the award actually went to Anthony Hopkins for The Father...and Hopkins had stayed home that evening.note This resulted in presenter Joaquin Phoenix (who looked as disappointed as everyone else) stating that the Academy accepted the statuette on his behalf, after which the ceremony just awkwardly stopped. Apparently, the reason for the schedule flip between Best Actor and Best Picture was that there were feelings behind the scenes that the catharsis of Boseman's widow coming up to accept the Best Actor award would have turned the Best Picture announcement into a towering anticlimax, and they were not wrong... but their attempts to avoid it, unfortunately, just made it worse. (Meanwhile, Hopkins posted a brief and gracious acceptance speech the next day over Instagram, thanking the Academy and making sure to mention Boseman, who was "taken from us far too early.") Not to mention that the Boseman snub reinforced the perception of the Academy as discriminatory against people of color.
- The 94th Academy Awards,note was contentious even before the ceremonies happened, due to eight technical categories being removed from the main broadcast, under heavy pressure from ABC, but it is known far more for a physical altercation than for the recipients. Presenter Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, comparing her shaved head (the result of alopecia areata) to Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. Jada's husband Will Smith initially appeared to be laughing along before he walked onstage and slapped Rock across the face. Smith later received the Best Actor award for King Richard, and apologized to the audience, but not to Rock. The footage of the slap itself went viral on social media, with memes about it spreading everywhere. Overnight it went from a discussion on celebrities fighting to a discussion on toxic masculinity, fidelity, and race, with various celebrities and social media split on which side to support. Rock declined to file a police report, and Smith resigned from the Academy and late posted a video on his Youtube channel, issuing an apology to Rock and feeling remorse for his actions.. Smith was also banned from attending future Oscars ceremonies and related events for 10 years.
