And the nominees were ...
(Black-and-White)
- Joseph August, Portrait of Jennie
- William Daniels, The Naked City
- Charles B. Lang Jr., A Foreign Affair
- Ted McCord, Johnny Belinda
- Nicholas Musuraca, I Remember Mama
(Color)
... when they should have been ...
(Black-and-White)
(Color)
- Jack Cardiff, The Red Shoes
- Robert Planck, The Three Musketeers
- Harry Stradling, Easter Parade
- Joseph Valentine, William V. Skall, Winton Hoch, Joan of Arc
And the Oscar went to ...
(Black-and-White)
This fast-moving and enormously influential manhunt melodrama was an eye-opener in its day because of its location shooting in New York City. If it seems routine and clichéd today it's partly because of the endless imitations in both movies and TV, including the TV series that was based on it. Arthur Fellig, the photographer known as Weegee, who was celebrated for his candid photographs, was a consultant, though director Jules Dassin's primary inspiration was the Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief. Daniels and his assistant, Roy Tripp, shot many scenes with hidden cameras -- the crowds are often actual New Yorkers, unaware that they're being filmed. Daniels began his long and extraordinarily distinguished career in 1917 and became for his work with Erich von Stroheim -- Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Greed, and The Merry Widow -- and as the favorite cinematographer of Greta Garbo. This was his only Oscar, but he was nominated three more times.
(Color)
Ingrid Bergman plays the title role in an adaptation by Maxwell Anderson and Andrew Solt of Anderson's play Joan of Lorraine, in which Bergman had appeared on Broadway. Much too long and talky, it was a major box-office disappointment, the last film directed by Victor Fleming, who had seen Bergman's Broadway Joan and persuaded producer Walter Wanger to back the film. Fleming and cinematographer Valentine died shortly after the release of the film, a presage of the ill fortune that would follow others associated with the project. Bergman would become a cause célèbre when she left her husband and child for director Roberto Rossellini, shocking people who identified her with the saintly Joan and the nun in The Bells of St. Mary's. And producer Wanger would be tried and jailed two years later for shooting Jennings Lang, agent and lover of Wanger's wife, Joan Bennett. He would also be forced into bankruptcy by the film's failure. This was Valentine's only Oscar after four previous nominations. It was also the only one for Skall, who was nominated an additional nine times. Hoch, on the other hand, won three Oscars, as well as a technical achievement award.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Black-and-White)
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| Director John Huston, Ted McCord, and a young extra during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre |
McCord was nominated for Johnny Belinda instead of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Both films were shot on location: Treasure in several locations in Mexico and the Mojave Desert, Johnny in Mendocino and Monterey. But the former seems to me the more visually exciting, as well as the more authentic in its use of location (the California settings of Johnny Belinda are supposed to be Nova Scotia). The actual nomination was one of three for McCord, who never won, but it's suggestive of his variety and adaptability that one of his nominations was for The Sound of Music, whose Austrian scenery is a long way from the harsh desert landscapes of Treasure. He had a long career, starting in the silent era at First National before it was absorbed by Warner Bros., then moving through several other studios before returning to Warners for most of his career, from 1936 through 1957.
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| Tim Holt, Walter Huston, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre |
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| Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre |
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| Jack Cardiff and Geoffrey Unsworth with the Technicolor camera |
It has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful films ever made, and Cardiff's technical innovations -- such as manipulating the speed of the camera so that dancers seem to hover in mid-air -- were enormously influential. Even Technicolor's persnickety watchdogs, Herbert and Natalie Kalmus, who had objected during the filming to some of the things Cardiff was trying to do, later admitted that it was one of the greatest uses of the process. So why was it not nominated for the cinematography Oscar? Cardiff later said that he had been told by cinematographer Lee Garmes that the American Society of Cinematographers, whose membership overlapped that of the Academy nominating committee, didn't want the Oscar going to a non-American cinematographer two years in a row: Cardiff had won the previous year for Black Narcissus. The snub was made more apparent by the fact that there were only four nominees for best color cinematography, whereas there were five for black-and-white. It may not be coincidental that 1948 was the year when, for the first time, the best picture Oscar went to a non-American film, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.
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| Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes |
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| One of Cardiff's innovations during the filming of The Red Shoes was to suspend the camera from bungee cords, to allow greater freedom of movement. |
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