This Documentary Won and Then Lost an Oscar For a Very Simple Reason

Despite its status as the most desired award in the entire industry, the Oscar has a long history of silly mistakes that eventually disrupted the ceremony’s course of events that year or another.

One of the latest and most scandalous cases is the confusion that swept the audience when at the 2017 ceremony La La Land was announced the Best Picture winner, but then it was quickly made clear that the one to take the award was Moonlight.

However, the Academy’s most notorious mistakes and misunderstandings can be found much earlier in time, back when one of the nominees got caught in violating rules and was eventually deprived of the already given award.

Young Americans’s Oscar Win Was Revoked for an Unfairly Simple Reason

Back in 1969, Alexander Grasshoff’s documentary had a triumphant win at the Oscars, taking the award for Best Documentary Feature.

However, the euphoria from such a critical success wasn’t long as soon after the ceremony the then President of the Academy Gregory Peck personally contacted Grasshoff and asked him to return the statuette since his movie turned out to be ineligible for the 1969 ceremony anyway.

It was revealed later that Young Americans had actually played at a small theater in North Carolina all the way back in 1967, which, according to the Academy’s rules, wouldn’t let the movie enter the list of nominees for the 1969 ceremony.

After Grasshoff’s death in 2008, his wife revealed that the Academy’s decision to retrieve the award hit hard, since the movie had nothing more but “a trial sneak preview in some little town”, which, ironically, was a solid reason for the Academy to change their mind after all.

The Oscar Incident Didn’t Destroy Alexander Grasshoff’s Career

Though his name is forever linked to so far the only film in the history to be deprived of an Oscar after receiving it, Grasshoff seemed to have moved on from the failure and eventually helmed several more successful movies and shows.

Apart from directing such hit TV series like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and CHiPs, Grasshoff also didn’t stay away from the documentary genre, releasing a movie titled Journey to the Outer Limits in 1973; in fact, the film even received an Academy Award nomination, but didn’t win this time.