| 30th Academy Awards | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Date | March 26, 1958 |
| Site | RKO Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, California, United States |
| Hosted by | Bob Hope Rosalind Russell David Niven James Stewart Jack Lemmon Donald Duck (voice of Clarence Nash by premade animation) |
| Produced by | Jerry Wald |
| Directed by | Trevor Newman |
| Highlights | |
| Best Picture | The Bridge on the River Kwai |
| Most awards | The Bridge on the River Kwai (7) |
| Most nominations | Sayonara (10) |
| TV in the United States | |
| Network | NBC |
The 30th Academy Awards ceremony was held on March 26, 1958, to honor the best films of 1957.
Two violent deaths surrounded the Oscars during this ceremony. A plane crash took the life of producer Mike Todd, ending the then-latest marriage of Elizabeth Taylor, at that time a contender for the film Raintree County. Lana Turner, in the running for Peyton Place, would soon be embroiled in a major scandal when Johnny Stompanato, her boyfriend, was killed in her Beverly Hills home.[1] The Best Actress award, however, was won by a relative newcomer, Joanne Woodward, who made her own dress for the occasion, causing presenter Joan Crawford to remark that she was "setting the cause of Hollywood glamour back twenty years by making her own clothes".[1]
As in the previous year, the blacklisting of certain writers led to anomalies in the writing awards. The Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium was awarded to Pierre Boulle for The Bridge on the River Kwai, despite the fact that he did not speak English, because the actual writers, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were blacklisted at the time and had not received screen credit. Foreman and Wilson have since been acknowledged by the academy as the true recipients of the award, though Boulle remains listed as an official winner.
Peyton Place tied the record for the most nominations without a win (9) set by The Little Foxes (1941). This record would stand until 1977 when The Turning Point received 11 nominations without a win, which is the record to date (The Color Purple tied the record in 1985). Peyton Place also set the record for most unsuccessful acting nominations, with five; this record has been tied once, by Tom Jones at the 36th Academy Awards.
For the first time in Oscar history, during the time period (1944–2008) when Best Picture was limited to five nominees, the Best Director nominees aligned completely with the Best Picture nominees. This would only occur four more times before the Best Picture category's re-expansion in 2009. As of the 96th Academy Awards, Designing Woman is the last film to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay when nominated solely in that category.
- ^ a b Wallechinsky, David; Wallace, Irving (1975). The People's Almanac. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. p. 841. ISBN 0-385-04060-1.