(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Frank Borzage, Bad Girl. Borzage's career peaked with his second Oscar, and his films are not much sought-out today. Of his subsequent movies, the best-known are the 1932 A Farewell to Arms, the interesting teaming of Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night, and two movies with Margaret Sullavan, Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm, the latter with an anti-Nazi message that was unusually powerful coming from a pre-war Hollywood nervous about losing the European market.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Howard Hawks |
 |
| Paul Muni in Scarface |
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| George Raft in Scarface |
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| Boris Karloff in Scarface |
Howard Hawks's "moment" came about a decade before his death, when critic Andrew Sarris put him in the pantheon of auteurs in his highly influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. He was already a favorite in France, of course, among the Cahiers du Cinéma set, and his movies with Humphrey Bogart, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, were essentials for the 1960s Bogart cult that had its epicenter at the Brattle Theater near Harvard and spread to college campuses across the country. But in a career that spanned forty-four years and about as many films, he was nominated for best director only once, for Sergeant York. It's astonishing to run down the list of Hawks films that received no nominations at all, starting with Scarface and including the dizziest of screwball comedies, Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby; the greatest newspaper movie (or at least the best remake of The Front Page), His Girl Friday; the quintessential Bogart and Bacall movies mentioned above; and the star-making Marilyn Monroe musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At the 1974 ceremony, responding to the urging of the younger generation of filmmakers who had rediscovered his works, the Academy gave Hawks an honorary Oscar, recognizing him as "a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema."
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