Is Marlon Brando the only ...

• Feb 23, 2006 03:00 AM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Question: Is Marlon Brando the only person who ever refused to accept his Academy Award?

Answer: No. Back in 1936, screenwriter Dudley Nichols refused to accept his best screenplay Oscar for The Informer (1935). The early 1930s were a time of bitter conflicts between the studios and their employees; studio executives were vehemently anti-union and accustomed to forcing actors, writers, composers and crew to work on studio terms or not work at all. Nichols, who later became president of the Screenwriters Guild, refused to accept his award as a protest against what was widely perceived as the Academy's decision to sell out its less powerful members to union-busting studio heads.

By the time George C. Scott got around to refusing to accept his best-actor Oscar for Patton (1971), he'd already made his disdain for the Academy Awards clear by trying to decline his best-supporting-actor nomination for The Hustler (1961) nearly 10 years earlier, calling the Academy Awards "a meaningless popularity contest" (a position he apparently arrived at after his nomination for 1959's Anatomy of a Murder). They nominated him again for Patton anyway — in fact, he was nominated yet again for The Hospital (1972). And, of course, Marlon Brando famously absented himself from the ceremony at which he won his best-actor Oscar for The Godfather (1972) as a form of protest against the depiction of Native Americans in movies; he sent a young woman who called herself Sacheen Littlefeather to explain his position.