Both films arrived on the heels of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which made 1969 seem less past than prologue. “ Judas and the Black Messiah” goes inside the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton, who was assassinated that December. “ The Trial of the Chicago 7” dramatizes the politicized court proceedings against activists who, the year before, protested the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 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. 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. Under the newly devised rating system, “Oliver!” became the first G-rated film to win Best Picture, and it remains the last. 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”).
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