It's a year where the Academy Awards are celebrating movies that openly embrace hot button social issues: a shocking relationship between two men, racial conflict, not to mention the questioning of all kinds of sexual taboos. The movies themselves are critical and box office hits, resulting in a slew of Oscar nominations.

Yup, 1967 was quite a year, no?

You thought I meant this year's Academy Awards. The confusion is understandable as the similarities are striking. Both 1967's Best Picture winner, In the Heat of the Night, and Brokeback Mountain have much in common. Both are about relationships rarely portrayed between two men: In the Heat of the Night is about the relationship between a white, southern sheriff, and a black detective from the north, while Brokeback tells of the passionate love between two men in rural America.

Both were adapted from books, and each was considered risky to film and likely to perform less than stellar at the box office.

Add in two more Best Picture nominees from 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which addressed interracial marriage, and The Graduate, which broke more sexual taboos, and the parallels between 2005 and 1967 grow even greater. Like Brokeback Mountain, Crash, and Transamerica, both Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night ask moviegoers a question: are you open-minded enough to see a movie that directly confronts the pressing social issues of the day?

The answer in 1967 was an emphatic yes. In the Heat of the Night was a surprising success, earning $25 million at the box office (in today's dollars, that translates roughly to $135,000,000). The movie was a critical success as well, earning rave reviews, and five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rod Steiger.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, meanwhile, earned twice as much as In the Heat of the Night ($56 million in 1967/$309 million in current dollars), though it wasn't as critically successful, receiving a fair number of bad reviews, and winning only two Oscars out of its ten nominations. The movie nonetheless touched a cultural nerve addressing as it did interracial marriage.

In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner were both controversial films. The makers of In the Heat of the Night deemed it unsafe to actually film their movie in the south, filming instead in Sparta, Illinois. In fact, Sidney Poitier felt so uncomfortable in the south that director Norman Jewison all but had to drag the actor to Tennessee for four days of filming.

Poitier's apprehension was understandable. Lynchings still occurred in some places below the Mason-Dixon line and, when younger, Poitier had been chased by a group of white men while driving in the south.

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