Awards presented March 20, 1948
The nominees were ...
(Motion Picture Story)
(Original Screenplay)
(Screenplay)
... when they should have been ...
(Motion Picture Story)
(Screenplay)
And the Oscar went to ...
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| Valentine Davies |
Miracle on 34th Street became the fourth film -- after The Story of Louis Pasteur, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and Going My Way -- to win two Oscars in the writing categories. Davies sold his first story to the movies in 1942 and wrote his first screenplay, for Three Little Girls in Blue, in 1946, landing a regular job at 20th Century-Fox. The following year, Miracle became the biggest hit of a nascent career, going through remakes for television in 1955, 1959, and 1973 before its big-screen remake in 1994. He received two more nominations for writing, It Happens Every Spring and The Glenn Miller Story, and produced an Oscar-nominated short film, The House Without a Name, in 1956. Having written the script for the biopic of one big-band leader, he wrote as well as directed another, The Benny Goodman Story, in 1956. In 1962, a year after his death, the Writers Guild, of which he had once been president, created the Valentine Davies Award to honor members "whose contributions to the entertainment industry and the community-at-large have brought dignity and honor to writers everywhere."
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| Edmund Gwenn, Natalie Wood, and Maureen O'Hara in Miracle on 34th Street |
(Original Screenplay)
A playboy artist (Cary Grant) gives a lecture at a high school, causing a teenager (Shirley Temple) to develop a crush on him. Her uncle (Ray Collins), a psychiatrist, suggests that Grant pretend to return her affections and scare her off. Her older sister (Myrna Loy) gets involved and, of course, Loy and Grant fall for each other. This tolerable latter-day screwball comedy would be nothing without Grant and Loy, but that's hardly the only reason why the Oscar it won is such a shocker. Just look at the other films nominated in the category, any one of which would have been a worthy winner. And then consider Sheldon's lightweight screenwriting career and his subsequent fame as the author of such shlocky page-turners as Bloodline and The Other Side of Midnight.
(Screenplay)
Seaton's first Oscar nomination was for the screenplay of The Song of Bernadette, but he had begun his career at MGM writing gags for the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, before moving to Columbia, where producer William Perlberg took an interest in his work. When Perlberg went to 20th Century-Fox in 1941, Seaton went with him. At Fox, Seaton became a director as well as a writer, and in 1951 he formed a production team with Perlberg. He won a second Oscar for The Country Girl and was nominated for the screenplay of Airport, both of which he also directed.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Screenplay)
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| Sergio Amidei |
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| Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini |
Vittorio De Sica's first great film influenced American directors as profoundly as it did European ones. But while De Sica gets the lion's share of credit for its success, which included the special award the Academy presented the film, inaugurating its practice of regularly honoring foreign language movies, the nominations went to the screenwriters -- deservedly so. Of the four nominees, Amidei and Zavattini, the two youngest, had the most distinguished screenwriting careers. Amidei had already been nominated for Open City, and after this would receive nominations for Roberto Rossellini's Paisan and General Della Rovere -- the latter starring De Sica. All of Zavattini's nominations were for work with De Sica: The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. would follow. Franci and Viola didn't live to see the great flourishing of Italian filmmaking as De Sica and Rossellini matured and Fellini, Antonioni, and others emerged, and they received no other nominations, but Franci also worked on The Bicycle Thief as well as De Sica's Miracle in Milan.
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| Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi in Shoeshine |
(Screenplay)
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| Daniel Mainwaring |
Mainwaring's screenplay was based on his novel Build My Gallows High, written under his usual pseudonym, Geoffrey Homes. He began his career as a writer in journalism, working for the San Francisco Chronicle, and published his first novel under his own name before adopting the pseudonym for a series of detective novels. He went to work as a publicist at Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, and moved into screenwriting when some of his detective novels were adapted into B-movies. Build My Gallows High was a departure from simple whodunits into material more in the noirish vein of James M. Cain's fiction. (Cain was an uncredited writer on Out of the Past.) His later film work included The Big Steal, which was directed by Don Siegel and reteamed Out of the Past's stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Siegel and Mainwaring would work together again, most notably on the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Some of Mainwaring's screenplays were credited with his pseudonym, and he is also said to have acted as a front for the blacklisted writer Paul Jarrico.
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| Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past |
