On Monday, every news site across the world will be full of stories about the 2019 Academy Awards, or the Oscars, as us laypeople call them.

We’ve already covered how this year’s Best Picture award is just one part of what will be a disastrous event, and a few quirky facts to pique your interest, but what we haven’t covered is the most famous uncovering in Oscars history.

In 1974, Robert Opel bared it all during the live broadcast, hosted by the unflappable actor David Niven, shortly after Niven announced that he was about to “divulge the contents of this year’s most important envelope”.

In other words, Opel nailed the timing.

Skip ahead to the 45-second mark and it’s all action:

That’s a pretty brutal barb about shortcomings, but Opel set himself up for it.

For the full story on the man in the buff, and the reasons for his streaking exploits, we go to the Telegraph:

…he was a 34-year-old conceptual artist and gay activist and his tackle-bouncing, peace sign-flipping dash across the stage had been in the name of sexual freedom. He’d recently gatecrashed a City Council meeting in the same under-dressed state, to protest against the ban on nudity at local beaches. “I thought the Council should see what an actual nude person looks like,” he said at the time, and was imprisoned for his trouble…

He had bluffed his way backstage by pretending he was a journalist covering the ceremony, inflating his credentials as a sometime photographer for the gay newspaper The Advocate. According to one of his friends, the fellow activist and author Jack Fritscher, Opel had hidden himself inside a piece of scenery full of so many cables that he thought he might be electrocuted…

Afterwards, instead of being arrested, Opel held court for the press, who bombarded him with questions. To the LA Times reporter who asked him why he had done it, he responded: “It might’ve been an educative thing to do. You know, people shouldn’t be ashamed of being nude in public. Besides – it’s a hell of a way to launch a career.”

You could say it worked, because Opel milked his 15 minutes of fame, appearing on talk shows, as well as booking a gig to streak at a party for Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev and composer Marvin Hamlisch.

Following that, he moved to San Francisco, and lived a life so interesting that his nephew turned it into a documentary.

Still, one feels he peaked when he streaked.

[source:telegraph]