11th Academy Awards 11th Academy Awards The 11th Academy Awards were held on February 23, 1939, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California. It was the first Academy Awards show without any official host. This was also the first ceremony in which a foreign language film (Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion") was nominated for Best Picture. Frank Capra became the first person to win three Best Director awards, to be followed by John Ford (who would go on to win four) and William Wyler. This was the first of only two times in Oscar history that three of the four acting awards were
89th Academy Awards due to President Donald Trump's immigration ban. He boycotted the event, saying, "I have decided to not attend the Academy Awards ceremony alongside my fellow members of the cinematic community." The Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs reacted to the travel ban, saying, "America should always be not a barrier but a beacon and each and every one of us knows that there are some empty chairs in this room which has made academy artists into activists." Two prominent Iranian Americans – engineer Anousheh Ansari, known as the first female space tourist, and Firouz Naderi, a former director of Solar Systems