Released the week before this past Sunday’s 80th Academy Awards ceremony, Mark Harris’ “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” (Penguin Press, $27.95) chronicles the conception, production and reception of the five films that competed for the Best Picture Oscar in 1967.

Through this narrative device, Harris examines what he calls a “paroxysmal point” in American movie history, when the Hollywood old guard began to be succeeded by voices that were fresh, young, iconoclastic (Dustin Hoffman wields a church cross like a club in “The Graduate”), European-influenced (the new filmmakers loved Truffaut and Godard) and hip.

The Los Angeles Times that year referred to the Oscars as a contest of battle-scarred “dragons” (Stanley Kramer, Spencer Tracy, Rex Harrison) versus gate-crashing “dragonflies” (Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols). As these competing species nervously eyed each other at that year’s ceremony, Harris writes, the “red-carpeted aisle… was becoming easy to mistake for a battle line.”

Like all cultural histories, especially perhaps those that attempt to ground themselves in the quicksand foundation of pop-cultural significance, which shifts each time we look back at it, Harris’ book depends on generalizations and a certain myopia to make its points. Harris writes that Hollywood was embarrassed when the 1966 Venice Film Festival ignored the product of the studios and chose maverick Roger Corman’s drive-in biker low-budgeter “The Wild Angels” to represent America; but he doesn’t follow this clue toward the undeniable truth that the edginess, hipness and permissiveness found in European New Wave releases already had made their way, pre-”Graduate,” into the American genre and exploitation films of the era, which were pretty much ignored by the U.S. critical establishment.

Harris is more concerned with the movies that had an immediate and clear impact on the mainstream — “critics’ darlings and major cultural phenomena.” In this regard, the five movies that competed for the 1967 Best Picture honor are a pefect fit for his thesis.

Two of the movies were particularly influential. The independently financed “The Graduate” showcased a new director (Nichols, who won the directing Oscar); a new and unlikely star (big-nosed Hoffman); flashes of bare breasts in a story of generation gap-spanning adultery; and (its most lasting legacy) hit pop songs by Simon and Garfunkel in place of a traditional orchestral score. The other important film was “Bonnie and Clyde,” produced by its ambitious star, Warren Beatty, and directed by Arthur Penn only after Truffaut and Godard turned the job down. An intentionally New Wave gangster story, “B&C” overcame studio head Jack Warner’s enmity and a scathing New York Times review to become a smash hit and the cover subject of a Time magazine story celebrating “The New Cinema.”

Two of the nominees concerned race. Norman Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night” was a solid mystery thriller transformed into a movie of social significance by the presence of its black detective hero (Sidney Poitier), who — a year before the “I Am a Man” posters appeared in Memphis — affirms his manhood by declaring “They call me MISTER Tibbs!” and — even more shocking — slapping a rich white bigot across the face. Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” meanwhile, was a character comedy about interracial marriage in which the black bridegroom (Poitier, again) was so unobjectionable that the movie failed to be controversial even in the South. (”Even George Wallace would like that n—–,” said H. Rap Brown, after seeing the movie.)

The final nominee was the joke of the bunch (Oscar has progressed in the past few decades: white elephants such as “Cleopatra” and “The Longest Day” are no longer nominated just because they cost a studio millions). Inspired by the smash success of “The Sound of Music” (which had won the Best Picture Oscar two years earlier), the fifth Best Picture candidate was the only old-fashioned Hollywood “entertainment” in the group: 20th Century-Fox’s musical “Doctor Dolittle,” starring snobbish Rex Harrison as author Hugh Lofting’s talks-to-the-animals veterinarian. Harris writes that the film “cost more than twice as much to produce and promote as the other four combined; it was the only movie of the five that had been fueled by a studio’s bottom-line goal to manufacture an immense popular hit, and the only one that flopped.”

It’s a tribute to Harris’ narrative skills that readers will find themselves rooting even for “Doctor Dolittle” as the books progresses; although we know the fate of the film, the author’s in-depth, behind-the-scenes saga of the making of “Dolittle” — and the other four films — actually becomes suspenseful. In fact, “Pictures at a Revolution” succeeds largely because its fun; it’s packed with information, but it’s also engrossing and even moving, as Harris offers mini-profiles of numerous key figures involved in the movie business at the time. These include “Bonnie and Clyde” screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman; Anne “Mrs. Robinson” Bancroft, the “older woman” who actually was born less than six years before her co-star Hoffman, the “young” man she shockingly seduced in “The Graduate”; New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who essentially was forced into retirement after being exposed as a dinosaur by his pan of “Bonnie and Clyde”; legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, teamed onscreen for the last time in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”; befuddled mogul Jack Warner; and troubled Sidney Poitier, the No. 1 box-office star of 1968, whose dignified portrayals of intelligent, handsome, Establishment black men held little interest for the audiences that soon would embrace such angry African-American heroes as “Shaft” and “Superfly.”

Particularly wicked (and entertaining) are Harris’ portraits of the ego- and dipsomaniacal Harrison and his much younger, out of control fourth wife, actress Rachel Roberts. At one party, Harris writes, the couple “appalled” such luminaries as Jimmy Stewart, William Wyler and their wives when the drunken Harrison sang “obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,’ while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.” Also irresistible is Harris’ four-page description of an intergenerational 1965 Fourth of July Malibu party hosted by Jane Fonda and director Roger Vadim. At this fete, such Old Hollywood legends as Darryl Zanuck and Gene Kelly rubbed elbows with such New Hollywood figures as Jack Nicholson and Tuesday Weld; no rock fan, Henry Fonda asked if the performing band, the Byrds, could “turn it down.” Meanwhile, outsiders such as New York’s Nichols watched everything from “a cocked eyebrow’s distance.”

Harris (a columnist for Entertainment Weekly) may stir feelings of nostalgia or even melancholy in some readers, who may wish that movies inspired as much debate today as they did in 1967. The nominees for Best Picture this year mostly were excellent, with “There Will Be Blood,” in particular, apparently destined for masterpiece status; but although passionate debates about the merits of “There Will Be Blood” vs. “No Country for Old Men” and the embrace/backlash/backlash-against-the-backlash response to “Juno” and even the show-offy uninterrupted Dunkirk Beach tracking shot in “Atonement” can be found on numerous cinephiliac websites, I don’t sense that a culturally literate person in 2008 feels it’s necessary to be familiar with these films in the way that such a person in the late 1960s would not have wanted to be left out of the conversation about “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Blow-Up” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” to cite a few examples. There’s just too much to occupy our time, including worthwhile books like “Pictures at a Revolution.”