The nominees were ...
(Original Story)
- Irving Berlin, Alexander's Ragtime Band
- Rowland Brown, Angels With Dirty Faces
- Marcella Burke, Frederick Kohner, Mad About Music
- John Howard Lawson, Blockade
- Dore Schary, Eleanore Griffin, Boys Town
- Frank Wead, Test Pilot
- Ian Dalrymple, Frank Wead, Elizabeth Hill, The Citadel
- Julius J. Epstein, Lenore Coffee, Four Daughters
- John Meehan, Dore Schary, Boys Town
- Robert Riskin, You Can't Take It With You
- George Bernard Shaw, screenplay and dialogue; W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple adaptation, Pygmalion
... when they should have been ...
(Original Story)
- Irving Berlin, Alexander's Ragtime Band
- Rowland Brown, Angels With Dirty Faces
- Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion
- John Howard Lawson, Blockade
- Dore Schary, Eleanore Griffin, Boys Town
- Frank Wead, Test Pilot
- Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde, Bringing Up Baby
- Norman Reilly Raine, Seton I. Miller, The Adventures of Robin Hood
- Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Jezebel
- George Bernard Shaw, screenplay and dialogue; W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple adaptation, Pygmalion
- Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman, Holiday
(Original Story)
Schary had been an actor -- he made his Broadway debut in 1930 in a play that, coincidentally, starred Spencer Tracy -- but turned to writing, first for the stage and then for the screen. The Boys Town screenplay was a turning point in his career, establishing him at MGM, where he soon became a producer. He was briefly in charge of the B-picture division of the studio in the early 1940s, but his stubbornness, compounded by his liberal political views in a studio headed by staunch Republican Louis B. Mayer, soon put him at odds with management. He went to work for David O. Selznick and for RKO, but returned to MGM in 1948 as head of production, and when Mayer was forced out in 1951 became head of the studio, though his tenure in the job lasted only five years. Griffin had worked at Universal for a year before moving over to MGM for Boys Town and then to Paramount and Columbia. She mostly worked on B-pictures and as a script polisher after her Oscar win.
(Screenplay)
George Bernard Shaw, screenplay and dialogue; W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple adaptation, Pygmalion.
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| George Bernard Shaw |
Because it's one of the least preachy of Shaw's plays and has a measure of romance, Pygmalion is well-suited for the screen. Producer Gabriel Pascal's later version of Major Barbara, filmed in 1941, doesn't work quite as well because its plot, characterization, and ideas are more complex. Shaw, as the Oscar citation notes, wrote additional dialogue for several scenes in Pygmalion, such as the Embassy Ball, which serve to "open up" the action beyond the stage version. He was famously miffed, however, at being nominated for the Oscar, blustering that it was "as if they had never heard of me -- and it's very likely they never have." But it's also said that visitors to his home at Ayot St. Lawrence found the statuette on display. Shaw would likely also be irritated that he has become an Oscar trivia item: He is the only person to win both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize in Literature. (For the record, Nobelists Jean-Paul Sartre and John Steinbeck also received Oscar nominations, though neither won.)
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| Wendy Hiller as Eliza in Pygmalion |
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Story)
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| Charles Spaak |
Belgian writer Spaak got into the business of writing for the movies when he was hired to be secretary to the French filmmaker Jacques Feyder in 1928. After helping convert one of Feyder's films into a stage play, he went on to write the screenplays for some of Feyder's most memorable works, including La Kermesse héroïque. He also wrote for filmmakers Julien Duvivier and Jean Grémillon, and collaborated with Jean Renoir on Les Bas fonds before working on Grand Illusion. After World War II he wrote screenplays for André Cayatte, Marcel Carné, and Philippe de Broca, among others.
