The nominees were ...
- Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat
- Henry King, Wilson
- Leo McCarey, Going My Way
- Otto Preminger, Laura
- Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity
... when they should have been ...
- George Cukor, Gaslight
- Vincente Minnelli, Meet Me in St. Louis
- Otto Preminger, Laura
- Preston Sturges, Hail the Conquering Hero
- Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity
And the Oscar went to ...
McCarey became the first person to produce the best picture while also winning as director and writer. (Under the Academy rules at the time, the best picture Oscar went to Paramount, and not to McCarey, so he can't technically be said to have won three Oscars for Going My Way, as Billy Wilder did for The Apartment, Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment, Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, the other producer-director-writer trifectas.) This was the beginning of McCarey's move into a more sentimental period than the 1930s, when he was a writer-director responsible for raucous comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, as well as for such screwball romantic comedies as The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. His devout Catholicism is on display in Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, and his near-hysterical anticommunism resulted in the bizarre My Son John.
... when it should have gone to ...
 |
| Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder |
This was Wilder's first nomination as a director, a role he had assumed in Hollywood only two years earlier, on The Major and the Minor, though he had directed a film in France in 1933. It also signaled a move into his characteristic mode as both writer and director: a deep but usually entertaining cynicism about people and their motives. The next fifteen years would be his period of greatest achievement, resulting in such classics as The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. He idolized Ernst Lubitsch, but never quite mastered the so-called "Lubitsch touch," perhaps because Lubitsch was ironic, not cynical. As a result there are often false steps in Wilder's films, such as the suicide attempt by Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a departure from character so glaring that it undermines the entire movie. The false steps became more frequent in his films of the 1960s and '70s, the post-censorship, post-studio era, when Wilder no longer had institutional curbs on his cynicism. But his best work sets an example that filmmakers still aspire to, as exemplified by writer-director Michel Hazanavicius's tribute to Wilder in his acceptance speech for The Artist: "I would like to thank the following three people: I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder."
