The nominees were ...
- Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth
- Greta Garbo in Camille
- Janet Gaynor in A Star Is Born
- Luise Rainer in The Good Earth
- Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas
... when they should have been ...
- Jean Arthur in Easy Living
- Greta Garbo in Camille
- Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door
- Ginger Rogers in Stage Door
- Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas
And the Oscar went to ...
The role of O-lan in the screen adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's novel was Oscar bait, given that it's two hours and eighteen minutes of suffering and struggling. It made Rainer the first person to win two consecutive Oscars for acting and, until Jodie Foster's wins for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, the only person to win two Oscars while still under the age of thirty. Unfortunately, Rainer's triumph was short-lived. MGM had trouble finding suitable roles for her, and when her marriage to playwright-screenwriter Clifford Odets hit the skids, she retired from films except for a few scattered performances over the years.
... when it should have gone to ...
Greta Garbo in Camille.
It is, quite simply, one of the movies' definitive performances. Though you can't always see what Garbo's Marguerite Gautier sees in Armand Duval, as played by the pretty, wooden Robert Taylor, you're always convinced that she's a woman in love. And the death scene is shattering: somehow Garbo lets you see the exact moment when life leaves Marguerite. It's not only shocking that Garbo should have lost to the rather ordinary performance of Rainer (we could have put up with her losing to another definitive performance: Barbara Stanwyck's Stella Dallas) but also that the film received no other nominations, despite skilled direction by George Cukor and luminous camerawork by William Daniels. The only explanation is that MGM was determined to promote the far more expensive The Good Earth, which was seen as a memorial to its producer, Irving Thalberg, who had died in 1936 before its completion.
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| Director George Cukor (standing, left) films Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille |
