The first and only X-rated movie to win ‘Best Picture’ was released in 1969
The Academy Awards have held the hand of cinema from the dawn of the craft in 1929 through to its contemporary dominance, handing out Oscars to the most expressive films, the most impressive actors and the most innovative crew members.
With an admitted bias towards the history of Hollywood specifically, the Academy has long favoured such filmmakers as John Ford and Steven Spielberg, as well as iconic performers such as Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
With that being said, the annual award show is fond of a bit of history-making, often giving prizes out to the most revolutionary artists who worked hard to innovate cinema. This has occurred from the very start of the Academy Awards, seen when they made Hattie McDaniel the first African American ever to win an Oscar for Gone With the Wind, through to when they gave Sian Heder’s CODA ‘Best Picture’ in 2022, a film that featured a largely deaf cast.
A similar slice of history was made during the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970, when the race for ‘Best Picture’ was hotly contested between Gene Kelly’s Hello, Dolly!, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and the controversial drama Midnight Cowboy, helmed by John Schlesinger and featuring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.
Telling the story of a naive hustler who travels from Texas to New York City to seek personal fortune and finds a like-minded friend in the process, the film was considered controversial thanks to its depictions of prostitution and homosexuality, which led to it being awarded an ‘X’ rating by the MPAA. Creating a moral panic at the time, many saw these films as too graphic or violent for audiences.
“I think the films are about survival in very strange circumstances”.
John Schlesinger
What made the backlash particularly remarkable was that Midnight Cowboy isn’t an exploitation picture in the traditional sense. Audiences expecting something salacious were instead confronted with a melancholy character study about loneliness, friendship and survival on the fringes of American society. The X rating became part of the film’s mythology, but it arguably obscured what Schlesinger had actually made: one of the most humane dramas of the era.
Making Academy Award history, the film was awarded ‘Best Picture’ in 1970, becoming the very first, and (currently) only X-rated movie ever to take home the Oscar’s greatest prize. Not only this, but John Schlesinger took home the award for ‘Best Director’ and Waldo Salt was granted the Oscar for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, penning the script from James Leo Herlihy’s novel of the same name.
There was also something quietly significant about Schlesinger’s role in the story. At a time when Hollywood was beginning to look beyond its own borders for fresh perspectives, it was a director from north London who ended up delivering one of the industry’s most celebrated portraits of modern America. Like several British filmmakers before and after him, Schlesinger brought an outsider’s eye to the country, capturing both its promise and its disillusionment with unusual clarity.
Ever since, Schlesinger’s film has been considered a 20th-century classic, making its way onto number 43 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Indeed, the film itself is a gentle, compassionate drama that speaks of the fragility of the human condition, even going so far as to take inspiration from icons of American art, with Andy Warhol informing one influential scene.
Exploring the myth of the American dream, Midnight Cowboy is an essential text, telling a familiar story that sees a plucky young man journey from the country to the city seeking opportunity, only to be dismantled by its pace and brutal reality.
Worthy to be considered as one of the many excellent films that deconstruct the national dream, Schlesinger’s classic remains a pertinent piece of filmmaking that defies the stereotype of its X-rating. Indeed, by today’s standards, it’s graphically tame.
