Best Art Direction, 1935

Awards presented March 5, 1936

The Academy was still indicating who placed second and third. Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark came in second and Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson were third.

The nominees were ... 

• Richard Day, The Dark Angel 
• Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer 
• Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark, Top Hat 

 ... when they should have been ... 

• Anton Grot, Gold Diggers of 1935 
• Charles D. Hall, The Bride of Frankenstein 
• Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark, Top Hat 

And the Oscar went to ... 

Richard Day, The Dark Angel. 

This was the first of Day's seven Oscars. He began as a set decorator for Erich von Stroheim in 1918, and so impressed that persnickety director that he stayed on until Stroheim's career began to crater after the notorious quarrel with Irving Thalberg over Greed (1924). But then Day went to work for a persnickety producer, Samuel Goldwyn, supervising the production design of thirty-seven of Goldwyn's films. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark, Top Hat.  

Van Nest Polglase

The phrase "Big White Set" became applied to the many sound-stage extravaganzas, featuring masses of dancers on fanciful sets, characteristic of 1930s musicals, particularly the ones starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO. Polglase was the head of RKO's design department, and his name went on all of the studio's productions, even though he didn't do the actual design work. That was typically left to the person whose name came second in the credits, in this case Clark. It was Clark who gave us fantastic boudoirs like the one from Top Hat shown below, with its round bed in a curtained alcove. And the stylized Venice beneath it. And the places where Fred and Ginger went to dance cheek to cheek. He was nominated for seven Oscars and never won, though he shared in a 1943 scientific and engineering award from the academy for "the design and construction of a moving cloud and horizon machine." But he also never lost his touch for the fanciful: His last nomination was for the stylized London seen in Mary Poppins.

Carroll Clark