Awards presented March 20, 1948
The nominees were ...
And the Oscar went to ...
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| Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young in The Bishop's Wife |
The bishop (Episcopalian) is David Niven, and his wife, neglected because of his obsession with getting wealthy contributors to his church's building fund, is Loretta Young. But an angel named Dudley (for some reason, angels in '40s Hollywood got rather stodgy names like Clarence and Dudley) comes down to Earth to set things right, partly by courting Young and arousing Niven's jealousy. This sugary fantasy is marred by miscasting: Cary Grant is nobody's idea of an angel, and the part turns him all stiff and twinkly, while Young's frosty Republican respectability keeps her from generating any heat with Grant. (To be fair, Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston also failed to strike any sparks in the unnecessary 1996 remake, The Preacher's Wife.) Niven comes off best, and he gets some good support from a supporting cast that includes James Gleason, Gladys Cooper, and Elsa Lanchester. Directed by Henry Koster, with the usual masterly cinematography of Gregg Toland. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett did some uncredited fixes that add a bit of bite to the screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Leonardo Bercovici. This was the first of three Oscars for Sawyer, who spent most of his long career as a sound technician at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, starting in 1930, and later worked for MGM. A year after his death in 1980, the Academy created the Gordon E. Sawyer Award to be given by its Scientific and Technical Awards committee to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." To date, there have been twenty-three winners of the award.
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