Emotions are always bound to run high at the Oscars. The last few weeks before the event, the tail end of what is already an exhausting press gauntlet, can be make-or-break for nominees who transform into villains or winners. (Timothée Chalamet’s arc in the public opinion is a fascinating one this year.) Awards season campaigns really got juicy in the late ’90s when Harvey Weinstein and the team over at Miramax perfected the art of surreptitious mudslinging in the press, paving the way for their nominees to take home trophies. In the age of social media, Oscar controversies have heated up even further, from viral campaigns to unscrupulous, unearthed Tweets.
And then there’s the ceremony itself, where certain controversies have become some of the most memorable moments of live television history. Here, we’re unpacking the nine biggest blunders and scandals at the Academy Awards over its 98 years.
The Marlon Brando No-Show
At the 1973 ceremony, Marlon Brando would have taken home his second Oscar for Best Actor for The Godfather, but when his win was announced, a woman in a buckskin dress and moccasins took his place instead. Sacheen Littlefeather declined the award on Brando’s behalf to boos from the audience (John Wayne reportedly had to be held back from trying to remove her from the stage personally).
Littlefeather and Brando devised the plan in order to protest Hollywood’s incredibly limited depictions of Native Americans onscreen and to draw attention to the American Indian Movement’s standoff at Wounded Knee. The Academy released an official apology for her mistreatment in 2022, just a few months after her death. To make matters even more complicated, though, Littlefeather’s two sisters claimed that she had fabricated her Native American identity entirely.
Laying It All Bare at the 1974 Oscars
Back in the mid-’70s, at the peak of the sexual revolution and mass civil uprising, streaking was halfway between an elaborate prank and a legitimate form of protest. At the 1974 awards, one intrepid young man, later identified as Robert Opel, raced across the stage (and onto the live telecast) in nothing but his birthday suit. Host David Niven took it all in stride: “Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”
Vanessa Redgrave Gets Booed
Vanessa Redgrave, known for being a rare winner of the Triple Crown of acting (an Academy Award, a Tony, and an Emmy), was also an outspoken activist. In 1977, she starred in Julia as an anti-fascist activist murdered by the Nazi government in Germany. At the same time, she had become sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and narrated a documentary about life in the West Bank, prompting both the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League to rebuke her. As she took to the podium to accept her award, some members of the Jewish Defense League burned an effigy of her outside, and she spoke out against “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.”
Angelina Jolie and Her Brother Get Close… Too Close
Does anyone else kind of miss Angelia Jolie’s wild child days? Before she reinvented herself as a humanitarian and a director with a poker face sculpted from marble, Jolie was jumping in pools fully clothed at the Golden Globes and wearing a vial of her much, much older husband Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck. Back in 2000, she was anointed for her performance as an unstable mental patient in Girl, Interrupted and swept nearly every major award for best supporting actress that year, including the Academy Award. To celebrate? She planted a kiss directly on her brother James Haven’s lips for all the cameras to see. (Apparently it was a running gag; another smooch had already been captured by the paps at the Globes the same year.)
Michael Moore Gets Cut Off Mid-Speech
Thirty years after Vanessa Redgrave’s booing, things were still hairy for stars who brought politics onto the Oscars stage. In 2003, Michael Moore picked up his first Academy Award for the perennially relevant documentary Bowling for Columbine. He was about as famous as a doc filmmaker gets and wasn’t afraid to mince his words. But when he took the chance to decry George Bush Jr.’s invasion of Iraq, “sending us into a fictitious war for fictitious reasons,” the audience jeered. “We are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!” the director declared as the music played him offstage, speech unfinished.
Billy Crystal’s Blackface
Billy Crystal is basically enshrined amongst Oscar lovers as the award show’s best host. He’s hosted a record nine times, including a bit of a miracle run in the ’90s. There’s no denying that Crystal helped make the Academy Awards what they are today, but not enough people talk about the fact that the comedian donned full blackface to do an impersonation of Sammy Davis Jr. for one of his opening monologues. Times were different, one might protest—but this happened in 2012.
The Moonlight vs. La La Land Kerfuffle
The 2016 Oscars gave awards audiences one of the great real-life versions of a Looney Toons bait-and-switch. There Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were onstage, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde and ready to hand out the final award of the night for Best Picture. Except, somewhere along the way, some butterfingers bungled the envelopes and passed off the one for Best Actress, announcing Emma Stone for her performance in La La Land, to Beatty. After a perplexed look from the actor, who showed it to Dunaway, she charged ahead, announcing La La Land that evening’s winner. Then, after a few minutes of confused shuffling, there was the announcement that became memed around the world: “There’s been a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture.” It was a high drama win for a little indie that could.
The Slap Heard Around the World
What more can be said about Will Smith’s Slap? It was supposed to be the actor’s homecoming, a triumphant moment after he and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, boycotted the Oscars for years over major racial disparities in both nominees and winners. Smith was nominated for Best Actor for his role in the tennis biopic King Richard and had swept the precursors all season. Then, in response to a cheap G.I. Jane joke from host Chris Rock about Pinkett Smith, he rushed the stage and slapped the comedian for all to see. Even though he won, the Academy banned him for 10 years, and his career has never really recovered (let Smith’s extremely weird and horny return to music be a warning to you all). I still contend that the real victim was Questlove, who had to go onstage in the nervous and confused aftermath of The Slap to accept the award for Best Documentary for his incredible film Summer of Soul.
The Emilia Pérez of It All
Looking back on it now, the backlash against Jacques Audiard’s 2023 film Emila Pérez seems inevitable: a tonally wild musical fantasia about a transgender Mexican drug kingpin directed by a heterosexual French man? It was just as insane to watch as it was to talk about, which somehow translated to 13 Academy Award nominations, the most of the season. The film was already on thin ice for its clumsy treatment of sensitive subjects; then the tweets emerged. The Internet poured over baldly bigoted posts from Karla Sofía Gascón, the film’s protagonist and the first openly trans woman up for best actress. The film still managed to eke out two wins, including Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña, but at this point, it’s forever doomed to be one of the stranger footnotes in Oscars history.
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