Awards & Honors

The Graduate won the Best Director Oscar and nominations for Best Picture, Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Actress (Anne Bancroft), Supporting Actress (Katharine Ross), Cinematography (Robert Surtees), Screenplay (Calder Willingham, Buck Henry)

Other awards for The Graduate include: British Academy Awards for Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Editing (Sam O'Steen), and Most Promising Newcomer (Hoffman); nominations for Actress and Supporting Actress
Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement
Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture - Musical/Comedy, Actress in a Musical or Comedy, Director, Most Promising Newcomers (Hoffman and Ross); nominations for Actor in a Musical or Comedy, Screenplay
The Grammy Award for Best Original Motion Picture Score (Dave Grusin, Paul Simon)
The Laurel Award (Producers Guild of America) to Katharine Ross for Female Supporting Performance; 2nd place Best Comedy; Nominations to Bancroft (Female Dramatic Performance) and Hoffman (Male Comedy Performance)
The New York Film Critics Circle Best Director Award

Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy

In 1996, The Graduate was chosen by the National Film Preservation Board to be one of the films preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

The film was #7 on the list of the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Movies in 1998. It was listed at #17 in the updated 10th anniversary edition.

The Graduate turns up on several other lists of great American movie moments compiled by the American Film Institute: #9 Funniest Movies, #52 Greatest Love Stories, #6 Greatest Movie Music ("Mrs. Robinson").

In 2006, the Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay #13 in its list of the top 101 of all time.

The Critics' Corner: THE GRADUATE

"The freshest, funniest, and most touching film of the year. ... Delightful surprises, cheekiness, sex, satire, irreverence toward some of the most sacred of American cows, gives us the distinct feeling that the American film will never be the same again."
– Hollis Alpert, Saturday Review, December 23, 1967

"Devastating and uproarious ... not only one of the best films of the year but also one of the best serio-comic social satires we've had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them. ... With Mr. Hoffman's stolid, deadpanned performance, [Nichols] gets a wonderfully compassionate sense of the ironic and pathetic immaturity of a mere baccalaureate scholar turned loose in an immature society. He is a character very much reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye."
– Bosley Crowther, New York Times, December 22, 1967

"Directed in modern, uptight fashion, which wears well for two-thirds of the pic. ...Anne Bancroft, feline and slinky in a manner very much like Lauren Bacall, is excellent, as is Katharine Ross, an exciting, fresh actress.... Only in the final 35 minutes does the film falter in pacing, which results in the switched-on cinematics becoming obvious, and therefore tiring."
– "Murf," Variety, December 20, 1967

"Dustin Hoffman is an original, likable actor whose bag of monumental insecurities marks the truly assured comedian. ... But the screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama."
– Time, December 29, 1967

"Right near the top of my best movies of the year list. ... There are brilliant performances...and a superb score by Simon and Garfunkel. The Graduate is uniquely today." – Judith Crist, Today Show, 1967

"Mike Nichols's name is so magical today that even if The Graduate had been the worst movie of the year, people would be buzzing reverently about it. As it is, The Graduate is only the most cleverly fashionable and confused movie of the year––and the responses, from critics and customers alike, have been ecstatic. ... And audiences eager to believe that all young people are sensitive and alienated and that all old people are sell-outs or monsters gratefully permit Hoffman's mannerisms and Paul Simon's poetry to convince them of a depth in Ben that the part, as written, simply does not contain. ... The movie as a whole is a Youth-grooving movie for old people. ... Nichols doesn't risk showing young people who are doing truly daring, irreverent things, or even young people intelligent enough to seriously challenge the way old people live. ... He has stated recently, in an interview, that Ben and Elaine are not to be envied at film's conclusion, and that Ben will end up exactly like his parents––which suggests attempts at a more harshly sardonic point of view than the film manages to convey."
– Stephen Farber and Estelle Changas, Film Quarterly, Fall 1967

"It's not surprising that this film has been such a financial success in the United States; its modish ingredients, so carefully blended, made no allowance for it to be anything other than a box-office hit." – David Austen, Films and Filming, October 1968

"Its exceptionally witty script, superficially daring bedroom scenes and lush, Lelouch-style surfaces help to obscure its rigidly conservative structure."
– Jan Dawson, Sight and Sound, Winter 1968

"[Charles Webb] seems to be the forgotten man in all the publicity, even though 80 percent or more of the dialogue comes right out of the book. I recently listened to some knowledgeable people parcelling out writing credit to Nichols, Henry, and Willingham as if Webb had never existed, as if the quality of the film were predetermined by the quality of its script, and as if the mystique of the director counted for naught. These knowledgeable people should read the Webb novel, which reads more like a screenplay than any novel since John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men."
– Andrew Sarris, 1970

"The famous word 'plastics' encapsulates the theme of the movie, which is that the adult world is artificial, is superficial, on some level immoral and irrelevant to the concerns of young people."
– Historian/critic Peter Biskind in a December 9, 2002, interview on National Public Radio

"The film throws our '60s shortsightedness in our face. How sheepish one feels, realizing the movie is no work of genius. In fact, what was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde."
– Robin Dougherty, Salon.com, 1997

"Director Mike Nichols and writers Buck Henry and Calder Willingham...understood that Benjamin was not exactly a man of principle. They didn't sign him up to protest the Vietnam War or reject his parents' wealth because of the way American rapaciousness drains the Third World's precious natural resources. Benjamin seems all too glad to drive the nifty Alfa Romeo his parents gave him as a graduation gift. Benjamin's dissatisfaction is never the heart of the movie because Benjamin is little more than a cipher. We root for him only because his confusion and weakness happen to pit him against the superficiality of his wealthy background, not because there is anything intrinsically heroic or admirable about him. Benjamin, in fact, is kind of a jerk. Without all the clutter of topicality, The Graduate is free to remain a classic with eternal, undated appeal."
– Barbara Shulgasser, San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 1967

"The film itself is very broken-backed, partly because Anne Bancroft's performance as the mother carries so much more weight than Katharine Ross' as the daughter, partly because Nichols couldn't decide whether he was making a social satire or a farce."
– Derek Adams, Time Out, June 24, 2006

by Rob Nixon