The nominees were ...
- Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator
- Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath
- Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois
- Laurence Olivier in Rebecca
- James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
... when they should have been ...
- Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator
- Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath
- Cary Grant in His Girl Friday
- Laurence Olivier in Rebecca
- James Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner
And the Oscar went to ...
It's a great performance, but is it really in a leading role? After all, Cary Grant gets the girl and is the catalyst for all that happens in the story. Stewart's Oscar here is thought to have been at least partly for his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the previous year, when he lost to Robert Donat. He had been in Hollywood since the mid-1930s, and was an MGM contract player. But it was Frank Capra at Columbia who made Stewart a major star by casting him in You Can't Take It With You and Mr. Smith. His career was interrupted by service in World War II, but he returned in 1947 for Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. He was nominated for that film and two more, but never won a second Oscar. He received an honorary award in 1985.
... when it should have gone to ...
It is, quite simply, one of the most fearless comic performances in movies: quick-witted, silver-tongued, unabashed in every respect. Grant could occasionally go over the top in this mode: Frank Capra let him do it in Arsenic and Old Lace, in which Grant pulls off double-takes that could snap a lesser person's neck and resorts once or twice too often to that whinny his characters sometimes do in exasperation. But director Howard Hawks knows how to keep things in balance, and Rosalind Russell knows how to keep Grant in check. They make a team that would be called peerless if we didn't have the evidence of Grant and Irene Dunne, or Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or Grant and Deborah Kerr, or Grant and Audrey Hepburn to show that it was a team with peers. He was, of course, unnominated, like all the rest of the gold in His Girl Friday.
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| Grant lays down the law as Walter Burns in His Girl Friday |
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