Academy Awards of 1967
 

The Best Picture of the Academy Awards of 1967 was appropriately, In the Heat of the Night, starring Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier. Few movies would frame the race divide so accurately as this story about an African American detective from the North and the unlikely friendship he forms with the Sheriff of a backwater, racist southern town.

Just as the Academy was beginning to acknowledge the race struggle, the nominations for Best Actor made the presence of the racial divide all too clear. Despite the fact that he starred in two of the nominated Best Pictures, including the winner, Sydney Poitier was not nominated for Best Actor for the Academy Awards of 1967. In fact, the statuette went to his co-star, Rod Steiger.

Another nominee in the Best Picture category was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? another tale of the strained relationship between blacks and whites. For her role as the mother of a girl in an interracial relationship, Katherine Hepburn would win her 2nd Oscar after more than three decades of performances since her first. She would go on to win a record two more before her career was over.

The winner of the Best Supporting Actor for the Academy Awards of 1967 was not in one of these two groundbreaking films about race relations, but he performed opposite Hollywood legend in a classic just the same. The film was Cool Hand Luke, the star of the film was Paul Newman and the winner of the Oscar, for his portrayal of the leader of the convicts, was George Kennedy.

For the Best Supporting Actress category, the winner would be Estelle Parsons, for her role as Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty)’s sister-in-law Blanche in the anti-hero classic, Bonnie and Clyde. This would be Ms. Parson’s only Oscar win.

Interestingly, the Best Director nod went the other way from this hotbed of racial conflict and drama, with Mike Nichols winning for The Graduate, a coming of age story about a middle class white man (Dustin Hoffman), who is set adrift after graduating college and finds direction in his abiding love for a young woman, only after engaging in an illicit affair with her mother. This nomination is unusual in that in Academy Awards history, the movie that determines the winner of the Best Director Oscar is almost always the Best Picture of that year. In this case, however, Best Director turned out to be The Graduate’s only Oscar.