Looking for a possible correction and predate for this milestone - first film to use CGI. I have it down as Tron (1982), which uses it sometimes (albeit not as extensively as you’d think).
What was the first film in color?
I believe that Annie Hall was the first comedy to win and Oscar for Best Picture.
And I also think that Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture.
Since there were silent films in color, this isn’t a sound film milestone.
“Steamboat Willie” was the first animated sound short. I’m surprise no one mentioned this before, since it’s so well known.
“Touch of Evil” may have been the first sound film where a scene showing people driving in a car and talking was actually shot in a moving car.
“Just Imagine” was the first science fiction all-singing all-talking musical. Also probably the last.
“Birds in Peru” was the first movie to get an X rating.
“Midnight Cowbow” was the first (and only) x-rated movie to get an Oscar (it was later recut and reedited to get an R).
I believe “Godfather II” was the first sequel to have roman numerals in the title.
No, that would be robot Yul Brynner’s point-of-view shots in Westworld (1974).
First film in color: the short A Visit to the Seaside (UK, 1908).
First feature in color: the documentary The Durbar at Delhi (UK, 1912).
First dramatic feature in color: The World, the Flesh and the Devil (UK, 1914).
First U.S. feature in color: The Gulf Between (1918).
First sound feature in color: The Viking (1928), with a music score and sound effects.
First all-talking feature in color: On With the Show (1929).
First comedy to win the Oscar for Best Picture: It Happened One Night (1934), which was also the first movie to win the top five Oscars (picture, director, screenplay, actor, actress). Other comedies to win the Oscar for Best Picture: You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Tom Jones (1963), and The Sting (1973), and the comedy-dramas Marty (1955) and The Apartment (1960).
The first sound cartoon for theatrical release was Max Fleischer’s Come Take a Trip in My Airship (1924), which opens with a 25-second sequence in which the animated figure of a woman speaks some patter as the lead-in to a song. The sound-on-film synchronization was by DeForest Phonofilm.
The first all-talking cartoon was Paul Terry’s Dinner Time (1928), using the RCA Photophone process. It opened two months before Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928).
There are too many sound features to mention predating Touch of Evil (1958) that had dialogue scenes actually filmed in a moving car, not with rear projection. Two well-known ones: It Happened One Night (1934) when Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert hitchhike, and Deadly Is the Female (1949), when the male and female leads drive to a bank robbery.
B]Midnight Cowboy** (1969) got re-rated by the MPAA from X to R in 1971 without any cuts or editing. Director John Schlesinger has stated definitely that not one frame was cut.
I don’t know if this counts, but the 1955 BBC serial Quatermass II might have been the first. Two years later it was remade as a feature film, titled Quatermass 2, which is possibly the earliest example of a sequel referred to as Something “2”.
OK - but what about CGI integrated with live action?
True, but, as your dates indicate, it did have a X-rating when it won the Oscar. X originally did not necessarily indicate porn was was meant to be like the NC-17 for mainstream movies. The MPAA later redefined what made an X and rerated “Midnight Cowboy.”
The first CGI integrated with live action may be Disney’s Tron (1982).