Best Picture, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

The nominees were ... 

• Hamlet 
• Johnny Belinda 
• The Red Shoes 
• The Snake Pit 
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

... when they should have been ... 

• Beauty and the Beast
• A Foreign Affair 
• Red River  
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Unfaithfully Yours 

And the Oscar went to ...
Hamlet. 

Laurence Olivier's film has not worn well. His Hamlet is a bit too given to posing and brooding, and his decision to deliver the soliloquies in voice-overs robs them of the emotional connection between actor and audience that they must have. The Freudian-influenced heavy-breathing that goes on between Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) and her son sometimes verges on silent-movie camp. (Herlie was in fact younger than Olivier.) It was the first British-made film to win the best picture Oscar, and Olivier became the first person to produce and direct himself to a best actor Oscar.

... when it should have gone to ...

Red River. 

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River

One of the greatest of all Westerns, superbly directed by Howard Hawks, beautifully filmed by Russell Harlan, with a magnificent score by Dimitri Tiomkin. John Wayne was never better, and anyone who scoffs that he wasn't an actor hasn't been paying attention to his work in this film. Montgomery Clift, in his first film (though not the first one released), is every inch a star, surprisingly believable as a tough, wiry cowpoke. The Academy, as usual, ignored it because it was a Western, though it did nominate Borden Chase's story, which he turned into a screenplay with the credited help of Charles Schnee, though the movie is so full of Hawksian touches that it's clear the master's hand was deep into the writing.