Oscars

The 29th Academy Awards were broadcast on NBC and hosted by Jerry Lewis and Celeste Holm. In this year, Best International Feature Film became a competitive category, having been given as a Special Achievement Award since 1947. The first competitive winner was Italy, for Federico Fellini's La Strada, which received a further nomination for Best Original Screenplay. This was the first year (and last until 1967) in which all Best Picture nominees were in color, and all were large-scale epics: The King and I, Giant, The Ten Commandments (the highest-grossing film of the year), Friendly Persuasion, and the winner, Around the World in 80 Days. This established a trend toward blockbusters and colorful spectaculars in the category, with The Bridge on the River Kwai, Gigi, and Ben-Hur following as Best Picture winners. The Best Original Story category was noteworthy this year for several reasons. The winner, Robert Rich (for The Brave One) was in fact a pseudonym of Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time and thus unable to receive credit under his own name. Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman withdrew their names from consideration for their work on High Society , as the nomination had been intended for the musical starring Grace Kelly, while Bernds and Ullman had instead written a Bowery Boys film of the same name the year before. The nomination was a double mistake, as High Society (1956) was based on the play and film The Philadelphia Story and did not qualify as an original story.