Best Picture, 1930-31

Awards presented November 10, 1931
(Films released from August 1, 1930 through July 31, 1931 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 

• Cimarron 
• East Lynne 
• The Front Page 
• Skippy 
• Trader Horn 

... when they should have been ...

• City Lights
• The Front Page 
• Little Caesar 
• Morocco 
• The Public Enemy 

And the Oscar went to ... 
Cimarron. For a long time (until 1991, in fact, when Dances With Wolves won the 1990 best picture Oscar), Cimarron was known as the only Western to win the best picture award. It really isn't much of a Western, however, based as it is on one of Edna Ferber's galumphing best-seller epics. At best, it has a few good moments of well-shot action, most memorably the great Oklahoma land rush of 1888. But the long-drawn-out melodrama of the marriage of Sabra (Irene Dunne) and Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) grows tiresome.
  
... when it should have gone to ...

The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy launched the indispensable career of James Cagney, gave us the memorable grapefruit scene, made Jean Harlow a star, and helped Warner Bros. become a leader in the gangster film genre. The Academy couldn't have known this, of course, and it would have been justified in giving the best picture Oscar to Little Caesar for introducing Edward G. Robinson, or to Charles Chaplin's defiantly non-talking City Lights, or Josef von Sternberg's Morocco for making stars of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, or even to the only deserving nominee, the first screen version of The Front Page. The other real nominees, as well as the bloated Cimarron, are deservedly neglected today.