And the nominees were ...
- Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda
- Montgomery Clift in The Search
- Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles at Me
- Laurence Olivier in Hamlet
- Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty
... when they should have been ...
- Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Montgomery Clift in The Search
- Henry Fonda in Fort Apache
- Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours
- John Wayne in Red River
And the Oscar went to ...
Olivier became the first person to direct himself to a competitive acting award. (He had previously directed himself in a role, Henry V, that earned him an honorary Oscar, as Charles Chaplin had also done in The Circus.) To date, the only other person with that distinction is Roberto Begnini. (No kidding.) It is a film, and a performance, that has not worn well. As Peter Ustinov observed about Olivier's Hamlet: "Of all actors, he is the most difficult to imagine as one who has not made up his mind." But perhaps we should be grateful to have some filmed record of a role that established Olivier as one of the great Shakespearean actors of the twentieth century. Although John Gielgud was said to have been better in the part, he never put it on film. This was Olivier's only competitive Oscar for acting, though for a long time his ten acting nominations was a record, tied only by Bette Davis and surpassed only by Katharine Hepburn's twelve. Lately, however, Jack Nicholson has racked up twelve nominations, too, and Meryl Streep's seventeen has become the mark to beat.
... when it should have gone to ...
John Huston brought out something in Bogart that no other director, with the possible exception of Howard Hawks, did: a potential for meanness. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bogart is Fred C. Dobbs, an American on the make in Mexico, who teams up with a kid (Tim Holt) and an old-timer (Walter Huston) to hunt for gold. The result is a genuine classic, one of those movies in which script, direction, and cast are perfectly in sync. So how the hell did the Academy fail to nominated Bogart, who gives one of his finest performances in the movie? The only answer is that his Fred C. Dobbs, itchy, paranoid, and unlikable, was so shocking a departure from Bogart's established image as a toughie who's really good at heart (Fred C. Dobbs isn't good anywhere) that it turned off audiences who expected a last-reel redemption. Or that Warner Bros., disappointed by the film's lackluster box office, failed to promote Bogart for the Oscar. Even so, there's no excuse for nominating the performances by Lew Ayres, Dan Dailey, or Clifton Webb instead, likable and skilled as those actors are.
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