{"id":808268,"date":"2026-10-20T04:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T04:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/808268\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T04:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T04:56:10","slug":"who-was-the-first-person-to-refuse-an-oscar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/808268\/","title":{"rendered":"Who was the first person to refuse an Oscar?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Who<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out\/Academy Awards<\/p>\n

October 19th, 2026 \u00b7 10:30pm BST <\/p>\n

You\u2019d think anyone in the movie business would be clamouring for that hallowed Academy Award<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of cinematic gongs. First bestowed in 1928, and that year\u2019s Wings walking away with \u2018Best Picture\u2019, the Oscars ceremony has been pulling in the world\u2019s attention to Los Angeles\u2019 most plush theatre halls and auditoriums to gawp at the latest winners of film\u2019s most illustrious cabinet filler.<\/p>\n

Yet, not everybody\u2019s been fussed to accept an Oscar. It\u2019s 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\u2019s history of Native stereotypes and the Wounded Knee Occupation.<\/p>\n

Two years earlier, George C Scott avoided the ceremony altogether<\/a> to honour his convictions that performing arts should never stray into the field of competitive sports, unconcerned with his \u2018Best Actor\u2019 gong for Patton and dismissing the whole event as a \u201ctwo-hour meat parade\u201d and \u201ca public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.\u201d Scott had even rejected his earlier nomination for 1962\u2019s The Hustler \u2018Best Supporting Actor\u2019 nomination.<\/p>\n

However, decades before such stances against the whole Oscars gig, one titan of Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age made the move to ignore their Academy Award when the ceremony wasn\u2019t even a decade old.<\/p>\n

So, who was the first person to refuse an Academy Award?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He was also a union man. As reported by PBS\u2019 Antiques Roadshow, in the early 1930s, the big studios made a piecemeal demand for labour rights by establishing internal \u201ccompany unions\u201d that offered toothless resistance to the might of the Hollywood bosses. In response, many of the business\u2019s writers, actors and directors formed independent guilds to challenge the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences\u2019 essential union-busting scheming.<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n

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<\/a> with the added note: \u201cTo 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\u2019 organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d came Capra\u2019s reply, only for Nichols to reject the award the second time.<\/p>\n

It would take another two years for Hollywood to officially recognise the guilds\u2019 role as legitimate bargaining unions, Nichols only then accepting his screenwriting gong for The Informer once his profession\u2019s demands were met.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out\/Academy Awards October 19th, 2026 \u00b7 10:30pm BST You\u2019d think anyone in the movie business would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":808269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[202443,163823,96,123,2839,33357,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-808268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-1930s","tag-academy-awards","tag-entertainment","tag-hollywood","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}