Let’s Watch the 1975 Academy Awards!

It was a night of controversy, colorful costumes, and awkward jokes. Let's revisit the 47th Academy Awards.

If you enjoy this piece and/or watching the Oscars we hope you’ll join us on Sunday night for our live chat coverage of the 97th Academy Awards. We’ll be hosting it in The Reveal chat room. Just look for our logo. We’ll be there all night. Like this piece, it’s for paid subscribers only. So now’s a great time to subscribe.

It’s April 8th, 1975 and, whatever you might have heard from Albert Hammond’s 1972, it is raining in Southern California. In fact, it’s been raining all day, but that hasn’t stopped the crowds from gathering outside the Los Angeles Music Center to watch the stars rush in before getting wet. It’s Oscar night, and who knows what’s going to happen? The past few years have seen George C. Scott refusing an award, Marlon Brando sending activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his trophy, and a naked man running across the stage behind David Niven. Will tonight be as eventful?

Thankfully, it’s not hard to recreate the experience of watching that night at home — even if the results have been available for fifty years — thanks to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ YouTube page, which contains uploads of large portions of old Oscars telecasts strung together in playlists dedicated to each year. (The only flaws: some awkward attempts to compensate for their inability to use copyrighted clips and the absence of live musical performances.) Ahead of this week’s Oscars ceremony, I decided to take advantage of that and travel back fifty years to that rainy night in April. Let’s watch it together. (For the sake of brevity, I’ve only embedded some of the clips. The whole playlist is here.)

Opening Remarks

For a while, every change to the Oscars telecast seems to have been designed to make it faster, more energetic, and more appealing to young viewers. If this was on anyone’s mind back in 1975 there’s little evidence of it. The night begins breathlessly enough with rapid-fire images of celebs making their way into the venue—look fast and you’ll see an bespectacled, eight-year-old Laura Dern next to Diane Ladd—before slowing things down. Way down. After recounting the Academy Awards origin story, we get a roll call of every single Best Picture winner from Wings though The Sting, a catalog that takes up over two minutes of airtime. Then, after some words from Academy president Walter Mirisch, it’s time to meet our Master of Ceremonies (or, as it will turn out, one of four MCs): Bob Hope.

This is Hope’s 18th, and penultimate, hosting gig and he delivers a topical monologue that’s occasionally funny on its own terms. But it’s often even funnier when the jokes fail to land, prompting the camera to cut away to celebrities either trying their best to look amused — a possibly stoned Jack Nicholson wears a plastered-on grin — or not bothering. “Movies have become so permissive these days,” Hope quips, “things I used to be too young to see I’m too old to do.” This elicits some chuckles, but Peter Falk doesn’t even try to look amused. A joke about Dustin Hoffman sending the Oscars-averse George C. Scott to accept his award makes no sense without knowing that Hoffman had made dismissive remarks about the Oscars in the lead-up to the night. We’ll hear more about that later.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, but Hope’s shtick works for me. I’m not old enough to remember when Hope was considered hip, but I am old enough to remember him as an aging network fixture whose specials remained prime time fixtures into the 1990s. You didn’t watch them because they were funny. You watched them because, well, they were on and Hope was a weirdly comforting presence. Why not spend an hour with an aging, one-liner dispensing jokester, Barbara Eden, Brooke Shields, Emmanuel Lewis, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and the AP All-American Football Team?

Of course, Falk and others might have their own reasons to not to find Hope amusing, some of which would become evident later in the night.

Best Supporting Actor: Winner, Robert De Niro (The Godfather Part II)

As had already become tradition, the Academy hands out a major award early in the show to get things off to an exciting start. But first, Ryan and Tatum O’Neal have to explain the voting process. The younger O’Neal won the previous year for Paper Moon and, after struggling with the envelope a bit, reveals that De Niro has beaten out, among others, his co-star Lee Strasberg to take home the prize. De Niro bounds to the stage in excitement! Or maybe he would if he’d been there. Instead, Francis Ford Coppola accepts the award on his behalf. This is followed by Roddy McDowall and Brenda Vaccaro presenting the animated and live-action short awards. (McDowall looks at ease. Vaccaro seems not to have read any of the titles or nominee names before taking the stage.)

Best Documentary Feature: Hearts and Minds

Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas then take the stage to hand out the documentary awards. This is traditionally the sleepiest part of the ceremony, but not this year. As director Peter Davis and his producing partner Bert Schneider accept the best documentary feature prize for the Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, Schneider states, “It's ironic that we're here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” Then things escalate even further when he reads a “short wire” from Dinh Ba Thi, the Viet Cong representative at the Paris Peace Accords thanking the anti-war movement for “all they have done on behalf of peace.” The speech gets some cheers and applause, but there will be aftershocks.