(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)
The nominees were ...
- Arrowsmith
- Bad Girl
- The Champ
- Five Star Final
- Grand Hotel
- One Hour With You
- Shanghai Express
- The Smiling Lieutenant
- À Nous la Liberté
- Frankenstein
- Freaks
- Grand Hotel
- One Hour With You
- Scarface
- Shanghai Express
- The Smiling Lieutenant
Grand Hotel. Although it's the only best picture winner that received no nominations in any other category, Grand Hotel remains one of the essential films of the early 1930s. The two Ernst Lubitsch/Maurice Chevalier musicals, One Hour With You and The Smiling Lieutenant, are more truly sophisticated entertainment, the unnominated Frankenstein may have left a more lasting influence on movie history, and I have a very different choice for best picture. But the opportunity to see Greta Garbo tell John Barrymore that she wants to be alone and Joan Crawford when she was lively and cute still makes people drop into Grand Hotel.
... when it should have gone to ...
Even though it's by far the best of the three gangster movies (the other two are Little Caesar and The Public Enemy) that launched a genre now seen as essential to the 1930s, there's no way the Academy would have given Scarface the best picture Oscar, given its distaste for genre movies and preference for high seriousness. But it's intense and even funny in ways that make it a classic, thanks to Ben Hecht's screenplay and Howard Hawks directing Paul Muni to what may the best performance of this sometimes too-hammy actor. The movie scared the bejabbers out of distributors and spooked even the pre-Code censors, so it wasn't released until two years after it was made, and then only after a didactic crime-does-not-pay scene was added, along with the subtitle, Shame of a Nation. It's not surprising then that the Academy gave it not a single nomination.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Scarface |
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