Honorary Awards, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

To Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement. 

Deanna Durbin

Mickey Rooney

When Durbin died this year at the age of ninety-one, there were featured obits in the larger newspapers, but most people alive today have never seen a Durbin movie. One reason may be that her light-classical soprano repertoire has long since gone out of style. Another may be that the sweet teenager she played in her most successful films has also gone out of style. In 1935 she had signed a contract option at MGM and made a short, Every Sunday, in 1936 alongside Judy Garland. But when the option expired, she accepted an offer from Universal to star in a feature, Three Smart Girls. The movie was a hit, and the series of Durbin girl-next-door musicals in the last years of the 1930s were so successful that Durbin is sometimes credited with having saved Universal from bankruptcy. In 1941, Joe Pasternak, who had produced Durbin's movies, left Universal for MGM, and Durbin, now in her 20s, began to battle with the studio over the direction of her career. Her attempts to break away from the ingenue roles, such as the oddly mistitled film noir Christmas Holiday in 1944, were not well-received by her musical fans. She made her last movies in 1948, and moved to France with her third husband.

Rooney has suffered no such career eclipse. A performer almost from birth, the son of vaudevillian Joseph Yule, he started making movies in 1926, starring in a series of dozens of shorts as Mickey McGuire, moving from silents into talkies. He signed a contract with MGM in 1934, the year in which he played the young Blackie Gallagher (the grownup character was played by Clark Gable) in Manhattan Melodrama. On loan-out to Warner Bros., he gave a remarkable performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, and in 1937 he became Andy Hardy in the film A Family Affair, a role that would recur through thirteen more movies. A career that would earn him four Oscar nominations, and in 1983 a second honorary award, was just beginning. The Internet Movie Database credits Rooney with appearances in 337 films.

To Harry M. Warner in recognition of patriotic service
 in the production of historical short subjects
 presenting significant episodes in the early struggle
of the American people for liberty.
(Warner Bros.' Declaration of Independence
won the Oscar for best two-reel short of 1938.)

To Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.

Shirley Temple presents Walt Disney the honorary award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: a full-size Oscar and seven miniatures

To Oliver Marsh and Allen Davey for the color cinematography of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, Sweethearts.

Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in Sweethearts. This was the last time an honorary award for color cinematography would be presented. Beginning with the 1939 awards, the cinematography awards would be divided into color and black-and-white categories.

For outstanding achievement in creating Special Photographic and Sound Effects in the Paramount production, Spawn of the North. Special Effects by Gordon Jennings, assisted by Jan Domela, Dev Jennings, Irmin Roberts and Art Smith. Transparencies by Farciot Edouart, assisted by Loyal Griggs. Sound Effects by Loren Ryder, assisted by Harry Mills, Louis H. Mesenkop and Walter Oberst.

George Raft, right, in Spawn of the North
An "Engineering Effects" award had been presented at the first Academy Awards, but outstanding special effects had not been regularly honored until this special award. Beginning with the 1939 Oscars, special effects would become a regular competitive category.  

To J. Arthur Ball for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of color in Motion Picture Photography. 

J. Arthur Ball with the Technicolor camera he devised. Ball, a pioneering color cinematographer, was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences