And the Oscar goes to . . .

The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that ‘… a fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution’. The loud implication is that the time taken to make the announcement ‘And the Oscar goes to …’ were ten seconds that shook the world. Mark Harris believes that at least three of the movies were radical departures, in conception and style, from all that had gone before. His long, and often very interestingly detailed, history tells how, and under whose aegis, the contenders came to line up at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the Oscars were presented in the days before they were a prime-time attraction.