40th Academy Awards

Infobox Academy Awards | name = 40th
poster =
caption = In the Heat of the Night winner of Best Picture
date = Wednesday, 10 April 1968
(originally scheduled for Monday, 8 April)
site = Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California, USA
preshow =
host = Bob Hope
producer = Arthur Freed
director = Richard Dunlap
duration =
network = ABC
last = 39th
next = 41st

The 40th Academy Awards honored film achievements of 1967. Originally scheduled for 8 April 1968, the awards were postponed to two days later, 10 April 1968, because of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..

Due to the increasing rarity of black and white feature films, the awards for cinematography, art direction and costume design were combined into single categories rather than a distinction between color and monochrome. The ultimate (surprise) winner in the Best Picture category was director Norman Jewison's engrossing thriller-murder mystery and sleeper comedy/drama film, "In the Heat of the Night" (with seven nominations and five wins - Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound). It illustrated the racial tension, prejudice, and eventual mutual respect and camaraderie expressed between a black police detective from the North (Philadelphia) and a Southern racist, white police chief in the small Mississippi town of Sparta, where both were compelled to work together on the same homicide case.

Winners

Feature Films

Writing

Honorary Oscar

Producer/director Alfred Hitchcock was presented with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, possibly in recognition of the fact that he had been nominated for the Best Director Award five times (for "Rebecca" (1940), "Lifeboat" (1944), "Spellbound" (1945), "Rear Window" (1954), and "Psycho" (1960)) but had yet to win. This was Hitchcock's first and only 'Oscar'.

Trivia

*Of the 20 performers nominated in the acting categories only two didn't attend; Katharine Hepburn, whose award for Best Actress was accepted by George Cukor, was in France filming "The Lion and Winter", and Spencer Tracy, whose nomination was posthumous
*There was no Governor's Ball