The nominees were ...
- Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night
- Grace Moore in One Night of Love
- Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street
... when they should have been ...
- Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night
- Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage
- Myrna Loy in The Thin Man
And the Oscar went to ...
As long as you don't remember that this is a competition, Colbert's win, like Gable's, is completely satisfying. Only a year before, Colbert had been taunting the censors by bathing nude in a tub filled with asses' milk as Poppaea in The Sign of the Cross, and even in the same year as It Happened One Night she was baring as much skin as the new Production Code would allow in Cleopatra. Yet here she is doing nothing more shocking than displaying a little leg while hitchhiking and sharing a motel room with Gable while outfitted in his pajamas, with a blanket hung between their twin beds. The point is, Colbert could be convincingly sexy while restrained by a censor who had the moral sense of an especially prudish and pious twelve-year-old girl. That's acting. In fact, it's worth noting the resemblance between Colbert and the actress who should have been one of her competitors for the Oscar, Myrna Loy. Loy had played vamps, slave girls, chorus girls, and a variety of exotic types with names like Azuri and Yasmani and Nubi in late silents and early talkies, and only a year or so earlier had been the flirtatious Countess Valentine, trying to lure Maurice Chevalier away from Jeanette MacDonald in Love Me Tonight. Yet in her breakthrough role as Nora Charles in The Thin Man, she's a happily married woman whose sexiness is communicated by her wit and intelligence (with the help of a few mildly revealing evening gowns). Both Colbert and Loy would have careers extending well into the late 1940s and beyond because they sensed the way to maintain their appeal was to become dream wives. Both, for example, played women with husbands off fighting in World War II, in Since You Went Away (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). And in both movies, they were sexier than the actresses playing their grown daughters, Jennifer Jones and Teresa Wright.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage |
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| "After ya kissed me, I used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!" |
The Oscar almost did go to Davis. If anyone had ever been a shoo-in for a best actress nomination it was Davis, who had been working in Hollywood for three years, getting the occasional good notice but making little headway toward stardom until Warner Bros., with which she had signed a contract in 1932, loaned her out to RKO for Of Human Bondage. Her no-holds-barred performance produced raves. But when the Oscar nominations were announced, Davis was not among them. It's a measure of how significant the Academy Awards had become in just seven years that there was an immediate outcry from the Hollywood press. A campaign was started to add Davis's name to the nominees, and even actual nominee Norma Shearer joined in. And the Academy backed down: It would allow write-in votes. Moreover, there would be a rule change for next year's awards: Instead of having a committee make the nominations, they would be voted on by the entire membership, with the results to be tabulated by the accounting firm then called Price Waterhouse. Even with write-ins, Davis lost. The Academy had begun announcing second- and third-place finishers with the 1932-33 awards (a practice it would discontinue at the 1936 awards), and Davis came in third. (Norma Shearer was second, and opera singer Grace Moore, who was being touted by Columbia as a new star, placed out of the money.) But the winner, Claudette Colbert, had been so sure that Davis was going to win that she had skipped the ceremony and was about to get on a train for New York when a messenger arrived with the news. Though not dressed for the occasion, she hurried to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to accept.
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