The nominees were ...
- William Dieterle, The Life of Emile Zola
- Sidney Franklin, The Good Earth
- Gregory La Cava, Stage Door
- Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth
- William Wellman, A Star Is Born
... when they should have been ...
- George Cukor, Camille
- Gregory La Cava, Stage Door
- Mitchell Leisen, Easy Living
- Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth
- King Vidor, Stella Dallas
And the Oscar went to ...
McCarey almost deserved it. The Awful Truth has some side-splitting moments, but then it falls apart a little at the end, with some prolonged nonsense about adjoining bedrooms and figures in a cuckoo clock. But that's McCarey, who was the first to team Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gave us the best of the Marx Brothers movies in Duck Soup, and made the comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap. Later, however, he let his devout Roman Catholicism take over for the sugary sentimentality of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's and his extreme anticommunism resulted in the incoherent My Son John; both make his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, nearly unwatchable.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| George Cukor, Greta Garbo, and Robert Taylor on the set of Camille |
If there is one film of Garbo's that gets singled out as her greatest, it's Camille. And let's give a lot of credit to Cukor for that. Not for nothing was he known as a "woman's director." He oversaw some of Katharine Hepburn's greatest performances, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement, as well as prepared and coached Vivien Leigh after he was fired as director of Gone With the Wind, helped get Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar for Gaslight, made Judy Holliday a star (and an Oscar-winner) for Born Yesterday, and nursed Judy Garland through her last great screen performance in A Star Is Born. But it's worth noting that he also got Oscar-winning performances out of James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and Rex Harrison, and showed a sure hand at directing Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others. Garbo should have won for Camille, and Cukor at the very least should have been nominated. He had to wait almost thirty years for his Oscar, for My Fair Lady, which made him, at sixty-five, the oldest person up to that time to win for directing. (The current record-holder is Clint Eastwood, who was seventy-four when he won for Million Dollar Baby.)
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