Honorary Awards, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

To Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement. 

Deanna Durbin

Mickey Rooney

When Durbin died this year at the age of ninety-one, there were featured obits in the larger newspapers, but most people alive today have never seen a Durbin movie. One reason may be that her light-classical soprano repertoire has long since gone out of style. Another may be that the sweet teenager she played in her most successful films has also gone out of style. In 1935 she had signed a contract option at MGM and made a short, Every Sunday, in 1936 alongside Judy Garland. But when the option expired, she accepted an offer from Universal to star in a feature, Three Smart Girls. The movie was a hit, and the series of Durbin girl-next-door musicals in the last years of the 1930s were so successful that Durbin is sometimes credited with having saved Universal from bankruptcy. In 1941, Joe Pasternak, who had produced Durbin's movies, left Universal for MGM, and Durbin, now in her 20s, began to battle with the studio over the direction of her career. Her attempts to break away from the ingenue roles, such as the oddly mistitled film noir Christmas Holiday in 1944, were not well-received by her musical fans. She made her last movies in 1948, and moved to France with her third husband.

Rooney has suffered no such career eclipse. A performer almost from birth, the son of vaudevillian Joseph Yule, he started making movies in 1926, starring in a series of dozens of shorts as Mickey McGuire, moving from silents into talkies. He signed a contract with MGM in 1934, the year in which he played the young Blackie Gallagher (the grownup character was played by Clark Gable) in Manhattan Melodrama. On loan-out to Warner Bros., he gave a remarkable performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, and in 1937 he became Andy Hardy in the film A Family Affair, a role that would recur through thirteen more movies. A career that would earn him four Oscar nominations, and in 1983 a second honorary award, was just beginning. The Internet Movie Database credits Rooney with appearances in 337 films.

To Harry M. Warner in recognition of patriotic service
 in the production of historical short subjects
 presenting significant episodes in the early struggle
of the American people for liberty.
(Warner Bros.' Declaration of Independence
won the Oscar for best two-reel short of 1938.)

To Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.

Shirley Temple presents Walt Disney the honorary award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: a full-size Oscar and seven miniatures

To Oliver Marsh and Allen Davey for the color cinematography of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, Sweethearts.

Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in Sweethearts. This was the last time an honorary award for color cinematography would be presented. Beginning with the 1939 awards, the cinematography awards would be divided into color and black-and-white categories.

For outstanding achievement in creating Special Photographic and Sound Effects in the Paramount production, Spawn of the North. Special Effects by Gordon Jennings, assisted by Jan Domela, Dev Jennings, Irmin Roberts and Art Smith. Transparencies by Farciot Edouart, assisted by Loyal Griggs. Sound Effects by Loren Ryder, assisted by Harry Mills, Louis H. Mesenkop and Walter Oberst.

George Raft, right, in Spawn of the North
An "Engineering Effects" award had been presented at the first Academy Awards, but outstanding special effects had not been regularly honored until this special award. Beginning with the 1939 Oscars, special effects would become a regular competitive category.  

To J. Arthur Ball for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of color in Motion Picture Photography. 

J. Arthur Ball with the Technicolor camera he devised. Ball, a pioneering color cinematographer, was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Best Picture, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 

• The Awful Truth 
• Captains Courageous 
• Dead End 
• The Good Earth 
• In Old Chicago 
• The Life of Emile Zola 
• Lost Horizon 
• One Hundred Men and a Girl 
• Stage Door 
• A Star Is Born 

... when they should have been ...

• The Awful Truth 
• Camille 
• Easy Living   
• Nothing Sacred  
• The Prisoner of Zenda 
• Shall We Dance 
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• Stage Door  
• Stella Dallas 
• Topper

And the Oscar went to ...
The Life of Emile Zola. One of Warner Bros.' socially conscious biopics, most of which starred Paul Muni, as this one does. It's really quite well done, though it glosses over the anti-Semitism that was at the heart of the charges brought against Alfred Dreyfuss, and it's just too neatly packaged to be truly memorable.

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

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Nothing in the Academy rules forbade its giving a best picture Oscar, or even a nomination, to an animated feature. But Walt Disney's breakthrough film seemed to confuse the Academy, even though it's one of Hollywood movies' great landmarks, right up there with The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer as a definitive event in the history of an industry. Its use of color to affect mood and create the tone of scenes taught live-action filmmakers a thing or two about Technicolor. (See the muted color of two 1937 films, Nothing Sacred and A Star Is Born, for examples of filmmakers still uncertain how to use it.) It also established the Disney studios as an enduring force in the industry. But it received only one nomination for the 1937 awards, for its music score. Its hugely popular songs by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey, including "Heigh Ho," "Whistle While You Work," and "Someday My Prince Will Come," were eligible in the song category, but they were overlooked. Perhaps the oversight was because the film had a limited release in December of 1937 and did not receive wide release until February 1938, but by the time the 1938 awards were given out the movie had grossed more than $8 million, having cost $1.5 million to make. So the Academy tried to make up for the oversight by giving Disney a special award, in recognition of "a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon."