Best Supporting Actor, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ... 

If the stereotype persists of Irishmen as either drunks or priests (but never both: the Production Code forbade that), we have Barry Fitzgerald to blame. Trained at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, he was brought to Hollywood by director John Ford in 1936 for the film version of The Plough and the Stars, and stayed on to be Hollywood's go-to Irishman, silver-tongued and hard-drinking, for the next twenty years or so. And even though he was a Lutheran he was a natural as a priest. Fitzgerald was the only person to have been nominated as both actor and supporting actor for the same role; the Academy changed the rules to prevent that from happening again, though the distinction between leading and supporting remains a hard one to make. Fitzgerald also made the news when he accidentally broke the head off of his Oscar. During the war, the statuettes were made of plaster; winners received metal replacements after the war ended.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Edward G. Robinson
Robinson's omission from the nominees remains one of the Academy's most glaring injustices. His quietly diligent insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, is a wonderful foil for Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray's murderous insurance-scam artists. The omission is compounded by the fact that Robinson never received a nomination, even in the days when he was a gangster for Warner Bros. or when he starred in Fritz Lang's noir classics The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 1970, but his 1973 honorary award from the Academy, although voted on before his death, was accepted by his widow.
Robinson and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 

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