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.

"We didn't need dialogue," Norma Desmond tells a young screenwriter in "Sunset Boulevard," recalling her silent-film-era glory days. Screenwriters famously suffer all sorts of indignities--dumb studio notes, credit squabbles--but now and then they get to win Oscars. Norma's heyday was just fading when the first Academy Awards were held, in 1929; the three writing categories that year were Best Original Story, Best Adapted Story, and (for the first and last time) Best Title Writing. It took several decades for the categories to settle into the modern dichotomy of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay, though the distinction can be tricky: originality, of course, is relative. This year's nominees draw on a wide range of sources, including the untold history of NASA, Jacques Demy musicals, science fiction, several lost mothers, and two plays about black life half a century apart.