My Own Private Oscars: Best Cinematography, 1935

Awards presented March 5, 1936

The Academy was still accepting write-ins and indicating who placed second and third. Hal Mohr was not an official nominee, but won as a write-in candidate. Gregg Toland placed second and Victor Milner third.

The nominees were ...

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

Hal Mohr, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Hal Mohr

Mohr became the only person to win an Oscar in a write-in vote. It has to be noted that every one of the write-in nominations that we know of (and we know of them only because they placed first, second, or third) was for a Warner Bros. film, including the write-in for "Gregory Rogers," a pseudonym for former Warners production head Darryl F. Zanuck, for the Original Story of G-Men. (Zanuck had left Warners in 1933 to found 20th Century Films, which he merged with Fox in 1935, but still had incredible clout.) But Mohr, who had replaced Ernest Haller as cinematographer on A Midsummer Night's Dream, deserved the award. He later recalled that director Max Reinhardt had had the art department build a forest that filled the sound stage, and Haller was tearing his hair out trying to film it. Mohr solved the problem by spraying the forest orange and covering the trees with cobwebs and glitter. Mohr's win, however, was the end of write-in voting, which the Academy banned the following year.