Best Actress, 1929-30

Awards presented November 5, 1930
(Films released from August 1, 1929 through July 31, 1930 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ...
Norma Shearer in The Divorcee. Of all the major female stars of the '30s -- Dietrich, Garbo, Harlow, Crawford, Hepburn, Davis, Colbert, Stanwyck, Loy -- Shearer is the one whose appeal has most faded with time. To many of us, Shearer seems arch, mannered, ordinary in appearance -- her slightly crossed eyes are often noted -- and unconvincing as an actress. None of her films is much revived today, with the exception of The Women (1939), and in that one Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and others almost wipe her off the screen, even though Shearer has the leading role. The conventional wisdom holds that Shearer was a star, the "First Lady of the Screen," as MGM billed her, because she was married to Irving Thalberg, the legendary head of production at the studio. Thalberg had spotted her the young Shearer when she was playing bit parts in movies in the early '20s, and hired her when he was putting together a company of players for Louis B. Mayer's studio (eventually merged into MGM) in 1923. She married him in 1927, and he managed her career until her death in 1936. Many of Shearer's admirers think, however, that Thalberg damaged her career, that her best work was done in silent pictures. In The Divorcée she is still lively and sexy, but Thalberg started casting her in "prestige" films, often adaptations of plays such as Strange Interlude and The Barretts of Wimpole Street that had been vehicles for great stage actresses like Lynn Fontanne and Katharine Cornell. After Thalberg's death, she fell out of favor with Mayer, and she made her last film, Her Cardboard Lover, in 1942, just as she turned forty, a dangerous age for any film actress. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Nina Mae McKinney (with Daniel L. Haynes) in Hallelujah
Wouldn't it be wonderful if it had happened? Or if this were a country in which it could have happened? Hallelujah is an amazing film for its time, and it remains a landmark: The first all-black talking film, it was shot on location in the deep South, mostly without sound. The voices and sound effects were dubbed in later, a laborious project for the time, because it was mostly an untried process. Its integration of music and story (the latter credited to director King Vidor among others) demonstrated what a sound film could do. And at its heart, as the seductive Chick, is the luminous McKinney. Vidor had spotted her in the chorus line of the Broadway musical Blackbirds of 1928, and signed her for his film. After the success of Hallelujah, MGM signed her to a contract, but found little for her to do. It loaned her out in 1935 to the British producer Alexander Korda for Sanders of the River, in which she appeared as the wife of a Nigerian chief played by Paul Robeson, and McKinney, sensing greater acceptance outside of the United States, decided to move to Europe. Often billed as "The Black Garbo" in Europe, she had a successful career as a cabaret entertainer and made several films. Returning to the States with the outbreak of World War II, she starred in films for black audiences, and made a few mainstream appearances in the usual roles for black women, maids and prostitutes. Of her later films, the best-known is Pinky, about a black woman trying to pass for white; the title role was played by Jeanne Crain. 
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