The nominees were ...
- Albert Basserman in Foreign Correspondent
- Walter Brennan in The Westerner
- William Gargan in They Knew What They Wanted
- Jack Oakie in The Great Dictator
- James Stephenson in The Letter
- Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday
- Billy Gilbert in His Girl Friday
- Edmund Gwenn in Pride and Prejudice
- George Sanders in Rebecca
- Roland Young in The Philadelphia Story
And the Oscar went to ...
It was Brennan's third Oscar, and his record for most acting wins would stand until the 1968 awards, when Katharine Hepburn got the third of her record-setting four, followed by three-timers Ingrid Bergman (1974), Jack Nicholson (1983), Meryl Streep (2011), and Daniel Day-Lewis (2012). Brennan was nominated one more time, for Sergeant York.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Edmund Gwenn in Foreign Correspondent |
Only Alfred Hitchcock would have had the perversity (or the good sense) to cast George Sanders as a good guy and Edmund Gwenn as a villain in Foreign Correspondent. Gwenn, who would later become the Oscar-winning embodiment of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, plays a creepy little man who almost succeeds in shoving Joel McCrea off the Westminster Cathedral tower. And then, in the same year, he's the gentle but ineffective Mr. Bennet, saddled with a foolish wife and five marriageable daughters in Pride and Prejudice. Gwenn had established himself on the London stage in the early years of the 20th century, attracting the attention of George Bernard Shaw and appearing in numerous Shaw plays. He made his first film in 1916 and appeared in one of Hitchcock's early films, The Skin Game, in 1931. Before World War II he divided his screen appearances between England and Hollywood, but settled in the latter, where he became a major character actor in the 1940s, working steadily until a few years before his death in 1959.
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| Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice |
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