Best Art Direction, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 

• Conquest, Cedric Gibbons, William Horning
• A Damsel in Distress, Carroll Clark
• Dead End, Richard Day
• Every Day's a Holiday, Wiard Ihnen
• The Life of Emile Zola, Anton Grot
• Lost Horizon, Stephen Goosson
• Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, John Victor Mackay
• The Prisoner of Zenda, Lyle Wheeler
• Souls at Sea, Hans Dreier, Roland Anderson
• Walter Wanger's Vogues of 1938, Alexander Toluboff
• Wee Willie Winkie, William S. Darling, David Hall
• You're a Sweetheart, Jack Otterson

And the Oscar went to ... 

Lost Horizon, Stephen Goosson. 

Though admirers of director Frank Capra's work have hyped Lost Horizon into something of a legendary film, it was a critical and financial disappointment at the time. It was Columbia's most expensive film to that point, and battles between Capra and cost-containing studio head Harry Cohn were intense. According to Capra's biographer, Joseph McBride, Capra shot more than a million feet of film, a ratio of ninety-three feet shot for every one used. After its first preview, it was heavily cut, and another chunk was taken out of it when it was re-released in 1943. The American Film Institute restored much of the film to its intended 132-minute length in the 1980s, using 16mm prints and supplementing missing footage with stills shown over the extant soundtrack. Those of us in the anti-Capra contingent find much of the movie dull and talky, too insistent on its message about the goodness of humanity when not corrupted by a ruthlessly competitive civilization. One thing both sides can agree on is that Goosson's sets are a remarkable expression of the streamline moderne aesthetic, though Graham Greene has a point when he observes that Shangri-la "resembles a film star's luxurious estate in Beverly Hills." (One Denver millionaire was so impressed with the designs that he had his own architect re-create them.)  

Best Art Direction, 1930-31

Awards presented November 10, 1931
(Films released from August 1, 1930 through July 31, 1931 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 

• Richard Day, Whoopee! 
• Hans Dreier, Morocco  
• Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras, Just Imagine 
• Anton Grot, Svengali 
• Max Rée, Cimarron  

And the Oscar went to ... 
Max Rée, Cimarron. Danish-born, Rée spent most of his film career as a costume designer, but he is also often credited, as on Cimarron, as a production designer. It was a film that demanded attention to period detail, as the boom town of Osage passes from its Wild West period through the oil boom and into the late '20s. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Stephen Goosson

Ralph Hammeras

 Just Imagine:

This otherwise clunky sci-fi musical, starring El Brendel, a long-forgotten Swedish-dialect comedian, still holds some fascination today because of the way Goosson and Hammeras imagined in 1930 the way things would look fifty years later, i.e. 1980. Goosson had been an architect in Detroit before coming to Hollywood, and the outlandish "moderne" look of Just Imagine would be toned down and refined when he created Shangri-la for Lost Horizon in 1937, work that won him an Oscar. He was head of the art department at Columbia for twenty-five years. Hammeras had been nominated for "engineering effects" in the first year of the Oscars, primarily for his work on The Private Life of Helen of Troy, and would receive a third nomination, again for special effects, for Deep Waters (1948). He specialized in miniatures and matte work.