Best Art Direction, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

The nominees were ... 

• Richard Day, The Affairs of Cellini 
• Cedric Gibbons and Fredric Hope, The Merry Widow 
• Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark, The Gay Divorcee   

.. when they should have been ... 

• Hans Dreier, The Scarlet Empress 
• Cedric Gibbons and Fredric Hope, The Merry Widow 
• Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark, The Gay Divorcee   

And the Oscar went to ... 

Cedric Gibbons and Fredric Hope, The Merry Widow. It edged out The Gay Divorcee by only two votes, according to Academy records, which would earlier have constituted a tie. (And maybe signified that the Academy, under the Production Code, was going to approve more of widows than of divorcees.) Gibbons put another Oscar on his mantelpiece, but as usual the MGM lion's share of work was probably done by the second name on the nomination, Hope, who had a brief career as an art director at MGM, starting in 1926 and ending with his death at the age of 37 in 1937. This was the last of the teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. They went their separate ways, MacDonald into the more familiar teaming with Nelson Eddy -- not a step upward.  

... when it should have gone to ... 

Hans Dreier, The Scarlet Empress. 

Hans Dreier

Dreier would rack up twenty-three nominations and win three Oscars, though they came late in his career, which was spent mostly at Paramount. Like Cedric Gibbons, he was head of a studio art department, and hence his work was primarily supervisory. On the other hand, he was less authoritarian than Gibbons, and liked to give free rein to the designers who worked for him. He chose to work closely with particular directors, including Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, who had strong ideas about the look of their films. Sternberg was the clear guiding hand on The Scarlet Empress, a film about Catherine the Great that seems to take place in an imperial Russia that exists only in fevered dreams. It's a remarkably silly film with the emphasis on remarkable. Dreier was greatly abetted in creating this phantasmagoria by the costume designs of Travis Banton, the gargoyles and other figures sculpted by Peter Ballbusch, and the paintings of Richard Kollorsz.