Credit: Far Out/Academy Awards
October 19th, 2026 · 10:30pm BST
You’d think anyone in the movie business would be clamouring for that hallowed Academy Award.
It’s the crème de la crème of cinematic gongs. First bestowed in 1928, and that year’s Wings walking away with ‘Best Picture’, the Oscars ceremony has been pulling in the world’s attention to Los Angeles’ most plush theatre halls and auditoriums to gawp at the latest winners of film’s most illustrious cabinet filler.
Yet, not everybody’s been fussed to accept an Oscar. It’s easier to pass on an Academy Award when you won one already, but Marlon Brando famously sent Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his second Oscar for The Godfather on his behalf in 1973, citing Hollywood’s history of Native stereotypes and the Wounded Knee Occupation.
Two years earlier, George C Scott avoided the ceremony altogether to honour his convictions that performing arts should never stray into the field of competitive sports, unconcerned with his ‘Best Actor’ gong for Patton and dismissing the whole event as a “two-hour meat parade” and “a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.” Scott had even rejected his earlier nomination for 1962’s The Hustler ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination.
However, decades before such stances against the whole Oscars gig, one titan of Hollywood’s Golden Age made the move to ignore their Academy Award when the ceremony wasn’t even a decade old.
So, who was the first person to refuse an Academy Award?
A former reporter for the New York Evening Post and making a successful jump to an in-demand Hollywood writer, Dudley Nichols would count 60-odd films under his belt for the likes of heavyweight directors such as John Ford, George Cukor, and Howard Hawks.
He was also a union man. As reported by PBS’ Antiques Roadshow, in the early 1930s, the big studios made a piecemeal demand for labour rights by establishing internal “company unions” that offered toothless resistance to the might of the Hollywood bosses. In response, many of the business’s writers, actors and directors formed independent guilds to challenge the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ essential union-busting scheming.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Nichols was firmly committed to the guild resistance. So much so, he was one of only two invitees to actually not turn up to the eighth Academy Awards, along with John Ford. Sticking up for the Screen Writers Guild, Nichols dismissed his 1936 win for the Irish thriller The Informer, reportedly mailing back his delivered Oscar to director and Academy president Frank Capra with the added note: “To accept it would be to turn my back on nearly a thousand members who ventured everything in the long-drawn-out fight for a genuine writers’ organisation.”
“The balloting does not in any way take into account the personal or economic views of the nominees nor the graciousness with which they may be expected to receive the recognition,” came Capra’s reply, only for Nichols to reject the award the second time.
It would take another two years for Hollywood to officially recognise the guilds’ role as legitimate bargaining unions, Nichols only then accepting his screenwriting gong for The Informer once his profession’s demands were met.
