The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has been reluctant to bestow the Oscar Award posthumously.
In 1939, Sidney Howard won a posthumous Best Screenplay Oscar for Gone With the Wind, to which other writers contributed but remained uncredited. Unfortunately, Howard was killed in a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm a few months before the picture’s world premiere in Atlanta. Peter Finch is still the only player to have won the Oscar, for Network, after his death.
