Best Picture Musicals: why five times a musical film snatched the Best Picture Academy Award in the period of 1958-1968

Abstract

The Academy Awards is perceived as the biggest Award Show on earth. “Best Picture” is seen as the most important prize a film can receive. Historically, the winner of Best Picture has always been from different genres. However, in the years 1958-1968, five out of ten Best Picture winners were musicals. This is an interesting factor because during this period, the popularity of the musical started to decline. Emmanuel Levy mentions this fact as well in his work Oscar Fever: “More musicals won Oscars in the 1960s than in any other decade, despite the fact that not many were made. Ironically, it seems that just as the musical genre began to decline, it gained in prestige.” It was not only the popularity of the musical that was declining though, the company who made the most musicals, MGM, struggled economically, just as a lot of other Hollywood companies did. It seems interesting that a genre that has been popular for over twenty years but was in the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s on the way out, won the most Best Picture Awards. So why did the musical became the most dominant genre of the Academy Awards in a time that the structure of Hollywood radically changed?