A man named Robert Opel notoriously streaked across the stage, in full view of hundreds of millions of TV viewers, just as co-host David Niven was about to introduce the Best Picture category, thus becoming probably the most famous example of the 1970s' streaking craze.
The last public appearance of Susan Hayward, who was in her final stages of brain cancer.
This was the only Academy Awards show dedicated to an individual, legendary producer Samual Goldwyn who had died three months earlier at the age of 91.
This was the year Katharine Hepburn made her only ever appearance at the Oscars, presenting the Thalberg Memorial Award.
Although it received no Oscar nominations, Westworld (1973) was represented by two of its stars being presenters for the evening--Richard Benjamin and his wife Paula Prentiss presenting the Best Film Editing Award to William Reynolds for The Sting (1973), and Yul Brynner presenting the Best Foreign Language Film Award to producer/director François Truffaut for Day for Night (1973) (known in America as "Day for Night"), from France. Before reading the nominations, Brynner announced that for the first time that year's foreign language films would be eligible for the following year's Best Picture category, although none of the entries that year did receive such a nomination.