My Own Private Oscars: Best Art Direction, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ...
(Black-and-White)

Hamlet. Art direction, Roger K. Furse; set decoration, Carmen Dillon
Johnny Belinda. Art direction, Robert Haas; set decoration, William Wallace

(Color)

Joan of Arc. Art direction, Richard Day; set decoration, Edwin Casey Roberts, Joseph Kish
The Red Shoes. Art direction, Hein Heckroth; set decoration, Arthur Lawson

... when they should have been ...
(Black-and-White)

Beauty and the Beast. Art direction, Christian Bérard, Carré; set decoration, René Moulaert
Hamlet. Art direction, Roger K. Furse; set decoration, Carmen Dillon

(Color)

The Pirate. Art direction, Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith; set decoration, Edwin B. Willis

The Red Shoes. Art direction, Hein Heckroth; set decoration, Arthur Lawson

And the Oscar went to ...
(Black-and-White)
Hamlet. Art direction, Roger K. Furse; set decoration, Carmen Dillon.

Furse had designed the costumes for Olivier's film of Henry V, but the costume Oscar had not been created yet. He was in luck this year: He also won the first ever black-and-white costume design award for Hamlet. Dillon had been nominated for the sets of Henry V, and would collaborate with Furse and Olivier again on Richard III.

(Color)
The Red Shoes. Art direction, Hein Heckroth; set decoration, Arthur Lawson.

Sketches by Hein Heckroth for The Red Shoes

Unlike the cinematographers, who denied Jack Cardiff a nomination and thus a second consecutive win by a Brit in their category, the art directors were not so jingoist, so this was the second Powell-Pressburger film in a row to take the color art direction Oscar. Heckroth had been a set designer for the ballet and theater in Germany, but left because his wife was Jewish. After living in the Netherlands and France, he ended up in England in 1935, where he designed for the opera before going to work for Alexander Korda on the film of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Unhappy with working for Korda, he was hired away by Alfred Junge, the design director for Powell and Pressburger, and designed the costumes for their A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. When Junge disagreed with them on the look for The Red Shoes, he quit and was replaced by Heckroth, who was nominated for both sets and costumes for The Tales of Hoffman before returning to Germany in the mid-1950s. This was the only nomination for Lawson, who was a prominent art director in Britain until his death in 1970.

Moira Shearer and Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes

... when it should have gone to ...

(Black-and-White)
Beauty and the Beast. Art direction, Christian Bérard, Carré; set decoration, René Moulaert.

Christian Bérard

Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête had its premiere at the Cannes festival in 1946, but was not seen in the United States until December 1947, and didn't receive a release that would qualify it for the Oscars until 1948. The Academy ignored it, however, as it did many foreign contributions to cinematic art, though Christian Bérard's collaboration with Cocteau produced images that remain as haunting today as they were when they first appeared. There was no makeup Oscar at the time, so Hagop Arakelian's magnificent Beast had no place to be admired, although almost everyone agrees that he's a far handsomer being than the somewhat wimpy prince he's revealed to be at the end: As the familiar story has it, Greta Garbo cried out, "Give me back my Beast!" when he's transformed. (A similar reaction occurs to the Disney film, which clearly modeled its Beast on Cocteau's.) Lucien Carré, who was sometimes credited only with his surname, was a French production designer whose career spanned thirty years.