43rd Academy Awards: History and Background

The 43rd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was held on April 15, 1971, and took place at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to honor the best films of 1970. The Awards, without a host for the third consecutive year, were broadcast by NBC for the first time in 11 years.

George C. Scott, winner of Best Actor for Patton, became the first actor to decline an Oscar, having previously protested his nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Hustler (1961) and quoted as saying that the Academy Awards were "a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons". He also maintained that it was "degrading for actors to compete against one another". Co-star Karl Malden agreed, but felt that Scott could have made his denunciation more subtly.

With her Best Supporting Actress win for Airport, Helen Hayes became the first performer to win Oscars in both lead and supporting categories (having won Best Actress 39 years before for The Sin of Madelon Claudet). Her win set a record for the biggest gap between acting wins, subsequently broken by Katharine Hepburn (48 years between her first and last wins).

The documentary film Woodstock garnered three Oscar nominations, making it the most nominated documentary film in Oscar history (its record was later tied by Flee, 51 years later).

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from 43rd Academy Awards by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.