My Own Private Oscars: 1928-29

Showing posts with label 1928-29. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1928-29

Awards presented April 3, 1930
(Films released from August 1, 1928 through July 31, 1929 were eligible.)

For the 1928-29 awards, only the winners were announced, and the runners-up received no official notice from the Academy. The records show who was under consideration, however, and they have traditionally been treated as if they were "official" nominees.

The nominees were ...

Hans Dreier, The Patriot
Cedric Gibbons, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Mitchell Leisen, Dynamite
William Cameron Menzies, Alibi and The Awakening
Harry Oliver, Street Angel

And the Oscar went to ...

Cedric Gibbons

This was the first of Gibbons's eleven Oscars, as well as the first of his thirty-nine nominations. The son of an architect, Gibbons started working as a production designer in 1915 and in 1924 began his long association with MGM, which continued almost to his death in 1960. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and designed the Oscar statuette. It needs to be pointed out that many of his nominations were based on the work of others (usually credited, though with Gibbons's name first) because of his position as head of the studio's production design department. But his taste was felt in all the creations of Hollywood's most prestigious studio, and outside it too: He designed the home of studio head Louis B. Mayer.

Don Alvarado and Lily Damita in The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Best Cinematography, 1928-29

George Barnes, Our Dancing Daughters
Clyde De Vinna, White Shadows in the South Seas
Arthur Edeson, In Old Arizona
Ernest Palmer, Four Devils and Street Angel
John Seitz, The Divine Lady

And the Oscar went to ...

Clyde De Vinna for White Shadows in the South Seas (above: Monte Blue and Raquel Torres)

De Vinna began his career as a cameraman for movie pioneer Thomas Ince, and developed as his specialty working on outdoor locations. White Shadows in the South Seas was begun as a collaboration between director W.S. Van Dyke and documentarian Robert Flaherty, but Flaherty hated the inane, melodramatic screenplay and quit. White Shadows was only part-talkie, which freed De Vinna to do more camera movement than the sound-bound movies of the day were capable of. It's also notable as the first movie in which audiences heard Leo, the MGM lion, roar. De Vinna continued to work with Van Dyke on such films as Trader Horn (1931) and the first movies in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan oeuvre, compiling reels of outdoor footage that reappeared in countless MGM pictures. He ended his career working in television, including "The Roy Rogers Show."

Best Writing, 1928-29

Tom Barry, In Old Arizona and The Valiant
Elliott Clawson, The Cop, The Leatherneck, Sal of Singapore, and Skyscraper
Hans Kraly, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
Hans Kraly, The Patriot
Josephine Lovett, Our Dancing Daughters
Bess Meredyth, A Woman of Affairs and Wonder of Women

And the Oscar went to ...

Hans Kraly

The Patriot today exists only in pieces, the only Oscar-winning film that has not been successfully restored, so we have no way of judging whether Kraly's screenplay deserved the Oscar. The competition, however, is unimpressive, and the film was directed by the estimable Ernst Lubitsch, so there's reason to believe that the Academy got this one right. Kraly begin his partnership with Lubitsch in Germany, where he was billed as Hanns Kräly, and came to Hollywood with the director in 1923. He received another Oscar nomination for the story of One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937).

Lewis Stone in The Patriot

Best Director, 1928-29

And the Oscar went to ...

Frank Lloyd

Almost forgotten today, Lloyd won two directing Oscars, the other for the best-picture winner Cavalcade (a film almost as forgotten as he is), and was nominated for directing another best-picture winner, Mutiny on the Bounty. Born in Scotland, he came to the States in 1910 and began his Hollywood career as an actor before moving into directing. As a director, he deliberately avoided imposing himself on the material, being content just to tell the story -- which was fine as long as the story was good, but by the end of his career he was working on films at Republic Pictures, not exactly a prestige operation. His first Oscar was for The Divine Lady, which makes him the only person to win a directing Oscar for a film not nominated for best picture, as well as the last person to receive an Oscar for directing a silent film (unless you count Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist).

Corinne Griffith and Victor Varconi in The Divine Lady

Best Actress, 1928-29

And the Oscar went to ...

Mary Pickford in Coquette. It was kind of a foregone conclusion. Pickford had been the movies' first superstar, having started making movies in 1909, when she was seventeen, and playing a little girl until she was almost thirty. In 1919 she joined with her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith to found United Artists, designed to release their independent productions. When she decided to cut off her golden curls, some of which are still in museums, and act her age, her career began to fade. After Coquette, she made only three more movies and retired. Realizing that "Little Mary" was at the end of her career, the Academy could either give her an honorary award or an Oscar (for one of her worst performances) to speed her out the door. It chose the latter, beginning a practice that it has indulged a little too often.

... when it should have gone to ...

Jeanne Eagels in The Letter

Eagels died of a heroin overdose on October 3, 1929, six months before the Oscars were announced. If she had won, and now that The Letter is on DVD we have persuasive evidence that she should have, she would have been the first posthumous winner. She had been a huge success on stage, particularly as Sadie Thompson in Rain, but her struggles with drink and drugs began to take their toll. She was planning to return to Broadway after The Letter earned her critical acclaim. It's often said that Bette Davis's performance in the 1940 film of The Letter was modeled on Eagels's and that Davis used her as the basis of her character in Dangerous, which won her the 1935 best actress Oscar.

Best Actor, 1928-29

And the Oscar went to ...

Warner Baxter

Baxter as the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona

If we remember Baxter today, it's as the ailing director who sends Ruby Keeler out with instructions to come back a star after Bebe Daniels breaks her ankle in 42nd Street. Which is an ironic echo of what happened to Baxter: Having had an undistinguished career to this point, he was thrust into the role of the Cisco Kid when Raoul Walsh, who was both directing and starring in In Old Arizona, lost an eye in an auto accident on location. Baxter's good looks and deep voice caught on -- the latter especially in the early days of sound -- but he never became a major star. Of his Oscar competitors, only Muni would have a significant career as a lead actor, though Bancroft, Morris, and especially Stone (a veteran silent-film actor) would become well-known in character roles. The influx of stage actors hired by the studios to replace fading silent stars was just beginning.

Best Picture, 1928-29

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...
The Broadway Melody. In hindsight, the Academy might have called a moratorium on awards this year, which was marked by the phenomenal technical and commercial achievement of converting the film industry from silence to sound. Certainly this awkwardly scripted, poorly acted, stodgily filmed, and clunkily choreographed movie can never be regarded as one of the signal achievements of the motion picture. That it laid the ground for the greatness of Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and MGM's Freed unit is about the best that can be said of it.

... when it should have gone to ...

The Cameraman

The Cameraman is one of the last of Buster Keaton's great silent comedies. Clearly, the Academy was not inclined to take a step backward into the silent-film medium it was working feverishly to eliminate, but of all the films eligible for the award this year, Keaton's has been the most enduring -- although for a time it was thought to have been lost. After prints were discovered in 1968 and 1991, however, it was carefully restored and was added to the National Film Registry in 2005 (an honor that has not yet been accorded to Broadway Melody, incidentally). The Cameraman was Keaton's first film for MGM, which assumed control over Keaton's later features, seriously damaging his career.