(Films released from August 1, 1930 through July 31, 1931 were eligible.)
The nominees were ...
- Richard Day, Whoopee!
- Hans Dreier, Morocco
- Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras, Just Imagine
- Anton Grot, Svengali
- Max Rée, Cimarron
Max Rée, Cimarron. Danish-born, Rée spent most of his film career as a costume designer, but he is also often credited, as on Cimarron, as a production designer. It was a film that demanded attention to period detail, as the boom town of Osage passes from its Wild West period through the oil boom and into the late '20s.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Stephen Goosson |
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| Ralph Hammeras |
This otherwise clunky sci-fi musical, starring El Brendel, a long-forgotten Swedish-dialect comedian, still holds some fascination today because of the way Goosson and Hammeras imagined in 1930 the way things would look fifty years later, i.e. 1980. Goosson had been an architect in Detroit before coming to Hollywood, and the outlandish "moderne" look of Just Imagine would be toned down and refined when he created Shangri-la for Lost Horizon in 1937, work that won him an Oscar. He was head of the art department at Columbia for twenty-five years. Hammeras had been nominated for "engineering effects" in the first year of the Oscars, primarily for his work on The Private Life of Helen of Troy, and would receive a third nomination, again for special effects, for Deep Waters (1948). He specialized in miniatures and matte work.
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