Best Actor, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
... and the Oscar went to ... 
Tracy plays Father Flanagan, the founder of an orphanage and school for what were then called juvenile delinquents. The real Flanagan complained that the movie made the real Boys Town look so clean and well-run that he was having trouble raising money. It made Tracy the first person to receive consecutive best actor Oscars, a distinction that would stand for fifty-six years, until Tom Hanks was honored for Forrest Gump a year after his win for Philadelphia. Tracy was flabbergasted when MGM announced that he was going to donate his Oscar to Boys Town, something he had no intention of doing unless he was given a duplicate statuette. The Academy complied. Tracy received six more nominations, the last one posthumously for his work in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, but never won another Oscar. 

... when it should have gone to ... 


Sheer, wonderful hokum, the Warner Bros. studio machine at its most efficient. Cagney plays a mobster who comes back to his old neighborhood to settle scores with crooked lawyer Humphrey Bogart. Cagney's boyhood friend, Pat O'Brien, has become a priest who works with the neighborhood toughs, played by the Dead End Kids -- Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, et al. O'Brien tries to get Cagney, whom the Kids idolize as the ultimate tough guy, to go straight, but he kills Bogart and is sentenced to be executed. O'Brien persuades Cagney to feign cowardice on his way to the chair so the Kids will be disillusioned. Some think this is Cagney's greatest performance, and it won him the New York Film Critics Award. It's certainly one of them: Only a great star could have pulled off the walk-to-the-chair scene. 
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