My Own Private Oscars: Best Art Direction, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

The nominees were ...

Beau Geste, Hans Dreier, Robert Odell
Captain Fury, Charles D. Hall
First Love, Jack Otterson, Martin Obzina
Gone With the Wind, Lyle Wheeler
Love Affair, Van Nest Polglase, Al Herman
Man of Conquest, John Victor Mackay
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Lionel Banks
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Anton Grot
The Rains Came, William Darling, George Dudley
Stagecoach, Alexander Toluboff
The Wizard of Oz, Cedric Gibbons, William A. Horning
Wuthering Heights, James Basevi

And the Oscar went to ...

Gone With the Wind, Lyle Wheeler.

This was the first of five Oscar wins for Wheeler, who also was nominated twenty-four times, a record exceeded only by MGM's Cedric Gibbons and Edwin Willis. Trained as an architect at the University of Southern California, he had worked as Gibbons's assistant art director before being hired by David O. Selznick in 1936. Wheeler's work on Selznick's film The Garden of Allah, which was shot in Technicolor, prepared him for the use of color in Gone With the Wind. The actual design of GWTW was done by William Cameron Menzies, but technicalities in the Academy's nominating rules prevented Menzies from being nominated for art direction. (The Academy compensated by granting Menzies a special award for his work on the film. A similar courtesy might well have been extended to Walter Plunkett, the costume designer.) But it was Wheeler's architectural background that helped bring Menzies's ideas to fulfillment. In 1944, Wheeler became the chief art director at 20th Century-Fox.