The nominees were ...
- Frank Capra, You Can't Take It With You
- Michael Curtiz, Angels With Dirty Faces
- Michael Curtiz, Four Daughters
- Norman Taurog, Boys Town
- King Vidor, The Citadel
... when they should have been ...
- Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, Pygmalion
- George Cukor, Holiday
- Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, The Adventures of Robin Hood
- Howard Hawks, Bringing Up Baby
- Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion
And the Oscar went to ...
This was the last of Capra's three Oscars. He would continue to make films until 1961, and live on for thirty years beyond that. But of his subsequent work, only Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life would receive critical and popular acclaim, and the latter film was not considered a success until repeated showings on TV made it an annual Christmastime event.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Jean Renoir |
The movies' great humanist, and in the opinion of Orson Welles and Charles Chaplin the greatest film director of all. (Why am I surprised that Welles and Chaplin named someone other than themselves?) Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game jockey with each other for positions on the lists of the greatest films of all time. Certainly, no Hollywood filmmaker of the time had quite the mastery of tonal variety -- from comedy to tragedy and back again -- as Renoir. It was the first foreign-language film to be nominated for best picture, although it should be noted that it received no other nominations -- not for Renoir as director, for his screenplay with Charles Spaak, for Christian Matras's cinematography, or for the performances of Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio and Erich von Stroheim. Its influence has been felt down the years, in such movies as Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, but it retains its freshness. It was almost lost during World War II, after being denounced by Goebbels, who had all French prints confiscated when the Germans invaded France in 1940. The negative was thought to have been destroyed in an air raid in 1942, but it was rediscovered in a French archive in the 1990s and a restored print was screened in 1999.
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| Marcel Dalio, Jean Gabin, and Pierre Fresnay in Grand Illusion |
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