Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1961

The Contenders:

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The Guns of Navarone
The Hustler
Judgment at Nuremberg (winner)
West Side Story

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1961

The Contenders:

Audrey Hepburn: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Piper Laurie: The Hustler
Natalie Wood: Splendor in the Grass
Geraldine Page: Summer and Smoke
Sophia Loren: Two Women (winner)

Cartier's is More of a Lunch Place

Film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

Let’s get the unpleasant business out of the way right off the top. Yes, Mickey Rooney’s depiction of Y.I. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is unfortunate, ugly, and racist. No, I don’t think it was specifically intended that way, but it’s absolutely how it plays out. Times change, opinions change, behavior changes. We move on. Pretty much everyone involved in the film has commented that he or she wishes it were not the way it is. In one sense, it’s a good thing that we’ve evolved socially enough that we can be made uncomfortable by an ugly stereotype or a character made specifically comic because of his national origin. On the other hand, it puts a pretty solid black mark on what is otherwise considered a classic and what is one of the crown jewels in Audrey Hepburn’s catalog.

I wanted to address that off the bat because blatant racism is something I’ve taken films to task for in the past, even when such racism was a product of its time. I get that we’ve evolved enough to understand it was wrong and that gives us a leg up on where the film industry was 50 years ago. Bully for us. The upcoming release of The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp in the role of a Native American shows that we also haven’t progressed that much beyond the whitewashing of a lot of roles. So, now that we acknowledge this and decry it, let’s move on to the rest of the film. At the very least, the ugly stereotype exists only in bits and pieces and not center stage as in many of the works of D.W. Griffith.