The Academy was still accepting write-ins and indicating who placed second and third. In the Original Story category, "Gregory Rogers" was not an official nominee, but placed second in the voting. Casey Robinson, who placed third in the Screenplay category, was also a write-in.
The nominees were ...
(Original Story)
- Moss Hart, Broadway Melody of 1936
- Don Hartman and Stephen Avery, The Gay Deception
- Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Scoundrel
- "Gregory Rogers" (pseudonym of Darryl F. Zanuck), G-Men
(Screenplay)
- Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, and Carey Wilson, Mutiny on the Bounty
- Dudley Nichols, The Informer
- Casey Robinson, Captain Blood
- Waldemar Young, John L. Balderston, and Achmed Abdullah, screenplay; Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt, adaptation, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
... when they should have been ...
(Original Story)
- Charles Bennett, The 39 Steps
- Dudley Nichols, The Informer
- Hugh Walpole, adaptation; Howard Estabrook, screenplay, David Copperfield
- Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin, Alice Adams
And the Oscar went to ...
(Original Story)
 |
| Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur |
 |
| Julie Haydon and Noël Coward in The Scoundel |
A sophisticated fantasy about a universally loathed New York publisher (Noël Coward) who gets a second chance after he dies if he can find someone who'll weep for him. Hecht and MacArthur not only wrote the screenplay but also directed and made cameo appearances. The witty dialogue makes up for the sentimental premise. It was Hecht's second Oscar, but the only one his frequent writing partner MacArthur was to win.
(Screenplay)
 |
| Dudley Nichols |
 |
| Victor McLaglen in The Informer |
Nichols enters the Oscar annals as the first person to refuse an Academy Award. The 1935 ceremonies took place in the thick of union battles, and many members of the Screen Writers Guild, such as Nichols, chose to boycott the awards because of the Academy's history: One of the reasons for its founding was to try to keep a lid on union organizing. Many of the founders, such as Louis B. Mayer, who came up with the idea of an academy, wanted it to serve as a mediating body in labor disputes, bringing together the various studio executives who were normally in competition with one another. It was never very effective in this regard, and when director Frank Capra became president of the Academy in 1935 he began the process of ending its role as a mediator. But Nichols returned his Oscar with a note saying, "To accept it would be to turn my back on nearly a thousand members [of the Writers Guild] who ventured everything in the long-drawn-out fight for a genuine writers' organization." Eventually Nichols seems to have had a change of heart: On the Academy's Web site list of winners and nominees, there is the note, "Academy records indicate that he was in possession of a statuette by 1949."
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