Event: Academy Awards

Nineteen sixty-six was great for movies, and six decades later, the five nominated for Best Picture at the thirty-ninth Academy Awards the following year are all still worth watching: Alfie; A Man for All Seasons; The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming; The Sand Pebbles; and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That 1967 Oscar ceremony seems to have taken place on a distant and different planet, though, light-years removed from the vulgar wokery that dominates Oscar night these days. Then, the show was elegant, well-paced, and wonderfully emceed by Bob Hope, dressed in white tie. The most memorable moment came during Audrey Hepburn’s presentation of the Best Picture Oscar, the dramatic finale of Hollywood’s annual celebration of cinema as art. After a brief exchange of compliments with Hope, Miss Hepburn recited the names and producers of the nominated films, took the envelope, read the card therein, looked briefly up to heaven—and then, with a smile of satisfaction, as if her prayers had been answered, announced that the winner was A Man for All Seasons. I recently rewatched Fred Zinnemann’s riveting cinematic adaptation of Robert Bolt’s play for at least the sixth time, and the thought occurred: Is A Man for All Seasons the most perfect film ever made? Everything about it seems exactly right. Bolt’s screenplay keeps the action moving, highlighting the story’s pivotal moments while losing nothing of consequence from the play’s script. Everyone in the cast is terrific, beginning with Paul Scofield’s Thomas More and continuing through Wendy Hiller’s Alice More, Robert Shaw’s Henry VIII (the young Renaissance hero, not the porcine lecher of later years), Orson Welles’s Cardinal Wolsey (embodiment of a Church crippled by its alliance with state power), Nigel Davenport’s rough-and-tumble Duke of Norfolk, Leo McKern’s cynically amoral Thomas Cromwell, and John Hurt’s Richard…