When voters rewarded the final part of Peter Jackson’s epic J. R. R. Tolkien adaptation, they were really giving the Oscars to the genre-defining trilogy as a whole. The film won all 11 categories in which it was nominated; only its surprising omission from the cinematography line-up prevented it from becoming the most-garlanded Oscar movie of all time. As it is, it remains the only film in Academy Award history to have been nominated in more than 10 categories and won all of them including best picture.
Films that have won the five top Oscars
Three films have taken home the so-called “Big Five”—best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, and best screenplay (either adapted or original).
It Happened One Night (1934)
It Happened One Night effectively invented the screwball comedy as it sent the ill-matched Claudette Colbert (as a runaway heiress) and Clark Gable (as a newspaper reporter) out on the road together. But its director Frank Capra had suffered humiliation the previous year when “Frank” was announced as the best director winner: Capra was well on his way to the podium, when he realized that the Oscar had gone to Frank Lloyd for Cavalcade. A year later, best director and best picture were his, but he was understandably slow to move when host Irvin Cobb opened the best director envelope and said: “Come and get it, Frank.”
In the best actor category, Gable won even though, under the old studio system, he had been loaned to Columbia by MGM as a punishment for his wage demands. In the best actress category, there had been such outrage that Bette Davis hadn’t received a nomination for her sensational performance in Of Human Bondage that the Academy had allowed her name to be written on the ballot. Everyone assumed her victory was a done deal, so though she was present at the ceremony, none of her competitors were. Colbert was actually on a train, waiting to go on holiday to New York; she was rushed back to the Biltmore Hotel in the sidecar of a police motorbike to collect her award.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
