Oscar said goodbye to the turbulent sixties with a curious batch of Best Picture nominees – the new, bold and daring were represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, the old-fashioned and safe by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the middle-of-the-road by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Now that the Hollywood Production Code was dead, the sex and violence which had been bubbling under the surface for so long was unleashed on the screen with a vengeance.

Sex and violence were bigger draws than the stars in such landmark films as John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which both exposed and celebrated the grunginess of pre-gentrification New York’s Times Square; Z, an exciting French financed political assassination thriller from Greece’s Costa-Gavras; Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, a drug fueled road trip ending in an explosion of violence; Haskell Wexler’s you-are-there look at the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in Medium Cool; Lindsay Anderson’s look at student rebellion ending in anarchy in If…; Luchino Visconti’s sex and violence filled rise of the Nazis in The Damned and Frank Perry’s sun and lust filled vacation ending in rape in Last Summer.

There was sex but no on-screen violence in Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo; Ronald Neame’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant; Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Larry Peerce’s Goodbye, Columbus, all of which were hits.

There was violence but no sex in two of the year’s best westerns, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. The sex and the violence were both off-screen in Sydney Pollack’s depression era drama, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War, the year’s best musical featuring parodies of World War I era songs.

With all these vibrant films vying for Oscar’s top honor, it was a shame that such retro nonsense as Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! had to steal two of the Best Picture slots. Anne was especially perplexing since the dialogue from the 1946 Broadway play was incredibly trite after the brilliant script of A Man for All Seasons mined the same territory just three years earlier. Dolly might have been an old-fashioned charmer had it starred one of the many middle-aged Hollywood legends vying for the role but 26 year-old Barbra Streisand had neither the experience nor the acting chops to bring it off even if no one questioned her singing.

For a while it looked like Oscar would make the safe choice and throw the Best Picture award to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that straddled the fence between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood, but in the end they did the right thing and gave it to the year’s real Best Picture, the X-rated Midnight Cowboy whose rating was changed to an R without a single frame being changed before the film was shown on network television.

The likely lucky five had Oscar gone to a ten nominee Best Picture slate that year? I’d say They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with its nine other nominations was a slam dunk. Right behind it would have been Easy Rider; Oh! What a Lovely War and The Wild Bunch. The last slot might have been a toss-up between Medium Cool; If…; The Damned and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but any one of them might have tipped the scales too far to the left for the blue-haired old ladies and old time studio hacks. True Grit, the amiable western in which even John Wayne lets fly with a few choice cuss words, would probably have prevailed.