Director FRED ZINNEMANN won four Oscars. Tonight is Oscar night , the 91st Academy Awards, with all the glamour and glitz attached.

This is what Mr. Zinnemann had to say about the annual awards:

“It’s always nice if you can win an Oscar, and I am delighted to have them, but I’m not delighted by the system. It’s a publicity kind of thing. By and large, it’s very important, but the mistakes that are made, are staggering.

There are so many pictures that are marvellous that never got an Oscar.There are a great number of directors who never got an Oscar, like King Vidor and a number of others. He only got a charity Oscar when he was dying.

It depends too much on politics, too much on publicity. Personally I don’t believe that there’s ever anything that’s the ‘best’ – it’s a very facile  kind of a thing to say this is the ‘best’.

How can you say that Beethoven is better than Mozart? It’s not right, so the whole concept of prizes is there really for the publicity and to get more people to pay their tickets to go to see movies.

How can you say that “Citizen Kane” is the greatest picture ever made, when D.W. Griffith made “Intolerance “ so many years earlier? “

Fred Zinnemann

Marlon Brando , Fred Zinnemann, Montgomery Clift

Irene Dunne presents Fred Zinnemann with Best Director Oscar for FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.

With Grace Kelly. HIGH NOON.