The 60th Academy Awards were held on April 11, 1988, hosted by Chevy Chase at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, the ceremony's first time in the larger venue in forty years. For the 60th anniversary the Academy hired producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. to stage the show, and Chase opened by joking that his entire monologue had been donated by five Teamsters. The telecast drew 42.2 million viewers in the United States.

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, an epic about the life of Pu Yi, China's last emperor, won all nine Oscars it was nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, adapted screenplay, cinematography for Vittorio Storaro, art direction, costume design for James Acheson, film editing, sound and original score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Cong Su. It was only the second film, after Gigi in 1958, to win every one of nine nominations, and its haul was the biggest since West Side Story won 10. Bertolucci said that…