The 48th Academy Awards were presented March 29, 1976 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. The ceremonies were presided over by Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, George Segal, Goldie Hawn, and Gene Kelly. This year, ABC took over broadcast rights from NBC, and continues to hold them today.

The most successful film of the ceremony was Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which became the first film since It Happened One Night to perform a "clean sweep" of the top categories; that is, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Adapted).

At age 80, George Burns became the oldest acting winner ever to that date. He was topped in 1990 by Jessica Tandy who was also 80 at the time, but older by a few months. He held the record for the oldest male and oldest supporting win until Christopher Plummer won in 2012 for Beginners at the age of 82.

Jaws became the last film to be nominated for Best Picture and to win all of its awards except for Picture until Traffic 25 years later.

An Academy Award is an award bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors and writers. The Oscar statuette is officially named the Academy Award of Merit and is one of nine types of Academy Awards.

The formal ceremony at which the Awards of Merit are presented is one of the most prominent award ceremonies in the world, and is televised live in more than 100 countries annually. It is also the oldest award ceremony in the media; its equivalents, the Grammy Awards (for music), Emmy Awards (for television), and Tony Awards (for theatre) are modeled after the Academy.

The AMPAS was originally conceived by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio boss Louis B. Mayer as a professional honorary organization to help improve the film industry’s image and help mediate labor disputes. The Oscar itself was later initiated by the Academy as an award "of merit for distinctive achievement" in the industry.

Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson

John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.

Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.

Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .

Louise Fletcher (born July 22, 1934) is an American actress best known for her role as Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and as Kai Winn Adami in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She also guest starred on the science fiction television series Heroes. She also received Emmy nominations for her guest starring roles in Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia.

Fletcher, the second of four children, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Estelle Caldwell and the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, who was an Episcopal priest from Arab, Alabama. Both of her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama. Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John and Georgianna, were all born without any hearing loss; she was taught to speak by a hearing aunt, who also introduced her to acting. After attending the University of North Carolina, she traveled to Los Angeles, California, where she found work as a secretary by day and took acting lessons by night.

Lee Grant (born October 31, 1928) is an American stage, film and television actress, and film director. She was blacklisted for 12 years from film work beginning in the mid-1950s, but worked in the theatre, and would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Felicia Karpf in the film Shampoo (1975).

Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in New York City, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants Witia (née Haskell), a teacher, and Abraham W. Rosenthal, a realtor and educator. The family resided at 706 Riverside Drive.

Grant studied acting at NYC's prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse under the guidance of famed acting coach Sanford Meisner before establishing herself as a dramatic actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her role as a shoplifter in the play Detective Story which began its run on March 23, 1949.

Lee Grant made her film debut two years later in the film version of the same name (Detective Story), receiving her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination, and winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify against her husband, the playwright Arnold Manoff, father of her two children, Grant refused to testify and was blacklisted, but continued to work in theater and resumed her film career in the early 1960s, appearing in the television series Peyton Place as Stella Chernak. She won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Drama for that role. In 1968, Grant appeared in the TV series Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat (Season 3, Episode 8 - "The Diplomat").