Oscars Spotlight: The 2021 Nominees for Best Picture

In 1969, as revolutionary fires burned, the Academy gave its Best Picture award to "Oliver!" Hollywood, still ruled by the crumbling studio system, was almost willfully blind to the nineteen-sixties; even breakthrough films such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Rosemary's Baby" were left off the Best Picture list, which included representatives of such superannuated genres as the big-budget musical ("Funny Girl") and the medieval costume drama ("The Lion in Winter"). Under the newly devised rating system, "Oliver!" became the first G-rated film to win Best Picture, and it remains the last. By the next year, movies like "Midnight Cowboy" and "Easy Rider" finally injected the ceremony with a dose of sixties counterculture--but the decade was over. Two of this year's eight Best Picture nominees are set largely in 1969, and they show what Hollywood wouldn't bring itself to see back then. "The Trial of the Chicago 7" dramatizes the politicized court proceedings against activists who, the year before, protested the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.