Best Writing, 1936

Awards presented March 4, 1937

The nominees were ... 
(Original Story) 

• Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur 
• Adele Comandini, Three Smart Girls 
• Robert Hopkins, San Francisco 
• Norman Krasna, Fury 
• William Anthony McGuire, The Great Ziegfeld 

(Screenplay) 

• Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur 
• Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, After the Thin Man 
• Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind, My Man Godfrey 
• Sidney Howard, Dodsworth 
• Robert Riskin, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

... when they should have been ... 

(Original Story)

• Charles Chaplin, Modern Times 
• Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur 
• Robert Hopkins, San Francisco 
• Norman Krasna, Fury 
• Mary McCarthy, Theodora Goes Wild 

(Screenplay) 

• Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind, My Man Godfrey 
• Sidney Howard, Dodsworth 
• Jane Murfin and Jules Furthman, Come and Get It 
• Robert Riskin, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 
• Maurine Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers, and George Oppenheimer, Libeled Lady 

And the Oscar went to ... 

(Original Story)

Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur. 

(Screenplay)

Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney, The Story of Louis Pasteur.

Collings and Gibney were the only writers to take home two writing Oscars for the same film, and were the first to be nominated in both writing categories. Previously there had been no overlap between the films nominated in the two categories, story and screenplay, but as this happened more and more often, the Academy began to rethink the divisions in the writing categories. Over time, this evolved into the current writing categories, one for screenplay written originally for the movies and one for adaptations from other media. Collings, who had been a screenwriter since 1925, died of pneumonia in the same year that he received the Oscars. Gibney served two terms as president of the Screen Writers Guild in the 1940s.

... when it should have gone to ... 

(Original Story) 

Charles Chaplin, Modern Times. 

Chaplin and Paulette Godard hit the road 

 Granted, René Clair's studio claimed that Chaplin ripped off À Nous la liberté for this particular "original story," but he claimed that his inspiration came from a conversation with Gandhi about the mechanization of modern life.  Modern Times was in fact an anomaly in the age of sound, though Chaplin originally planned it as a talkie, even writing dialogue for it before deciding that the humor in it should remain essentially visual. His voice is heard, however, in one scene in which he sings a song in gibberish. In any case, the Academy's neglect of the film, giving it no nominations in any category, was absurd.

(Screenplay) 

Sidney Howard, Dodsworth. 

In 1937 Sidney Howard was well known enough to make the cover of Time. Today he is remembered mainly by Oscar buffs who know that he won the award posthumously (he died in a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm) for the screenplay of Gone With the Wind, even though it had been worked over by every writer in Hollywood from Ben Hecht to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Musical theater fans also know that his Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted was adapted by Frank Loesser into The Most Happy Fella. Howard was brought to Hollywood by the prestige-seeking producer Sam Goldwyn, for whom he adapted the Sinclair Lewis novels Arrowsmith and Dodsworth for the movies, having already had a Broadway success with a stage adaptation of the latter. Howard's plays are seldom performed today, but his Dodsworth screenplay is in many ways an improvement on Lewis's novel, being tighter and less didactic. His daughter, Jennifer Howard, married Samuel Goldwyn Jr., making Sidney Howard the grandfather of the actor Tony Goldwyn.