The best performances & achievements from 1968 are honored as the 41st Academy Awards are telecast from the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. Gregory Peck introduces the "Friends of Oscar," presenters who serve as hosts. They include Ingrid Bergman, Sidney Poitier, Jane Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Natalie Wood, Walter Matthau, Diahann Carroll, Tony Curtis, Rosalind Russell, and Burt Lancaster. Frank Sinatra sings an opening number from the motion picture "Star!" Jack Albertson accepts a best supporting actor award, the first of many awards given this evening. Other
award winners and performers include Boris Levin, Abbey Lincoln, Jose Feliciano, Ruth Gordon, Marni Nixon, Henri Mancini, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Onna White, Aretha Franklin, Carol Reed, Bob Hope, Martha Raye (the first woman recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award), Anthony Harvey, Barbra Streisand, and John Woolf. Hank Sims introduces and closes the program.             

The story of famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who vanished from a California beach in 1926 setting off an extensive police search. Six weeks later she turned up in Mexico claiming she had been kidnapped. Many, including her mother and the police, suspected Aimee staged her own disappearance to conceal an affair with a married man.