Showing posts with label The Awful Truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Awful Truth. Show all posts

Best Director, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
McCarey almost deserved it. The Awful Truth has some side-splitting moments, but then it falls apart a little at the end, with some prolonged nonsense about adjoining bedrooms and figures in a cuckoo clock. But that's McCarey, who was the first to team Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gave us the best of the Marx Brothers movies in Duck Soup, and made the comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap. Later, however, he let his devout Roman Catholicism take over for the sugary sentimentality of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's and his extreme anticommunism resulted in the incoherent My Son John; both make his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, nearly unwatchable.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
George Cukor, Greta Garbo, and Robert Taylor on the set of Camille 
If there is one film of Garbo's that gets singled out as her greatest, it's Camille. And let's give a lot of credit to Cukor for that. Not for nothing was he known as a "woman's director." He oversaw some of Katharine Hepburn's greatest performances, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement, as well as prepared and coached Vivien Leigh after he was fired as director of Gone With the Wind, helped get Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar for Gaslight, made Judy Holliday a star (and an Oscar-winner) for Born Yesterday, and nursed Judy Garland through her last great screen performance in A Star Is Born. But it's worth noting that he also got Oscar-winning performances out of James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and Rex Harrison, and showed a sure hand at directing Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others. Garbo should have won for Camille, and Cukor at the very least should have been nominated. He had to wait almost thirty years for his Oscar, for My Fair Lady, which made him, at sixty-five, the oldest person up to that time to win for directing. (The current record-holder is Clint Eastwood, who was seventy-four when he won for Million Dollar Baby.) 
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Best Supporting Actor, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Born in Vienna, Schildkraut studied acting under Albert Basserman in Germany and became a star in the company headed by Max Reinhardt before coming to America in 1920. He was a major Broadway star in the 1920s and made several important silent films, including D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm and Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, in which he played Judas. His last major film appearance was as Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, a role he had created on stage.   

... when it should have gone to ... 
Bellamy was the perfect stooge, the guy who, by his own admission, never got the girl. At least, he didn't in the two great comic films in which he lost out (as who wouldn't?) to Cary Grant, The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday. The genius of Bellamy in both movies is that he makes us believe that Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell might fall for this nice, dull guy as a way of escaping from the volatility of life with Grant. It's worth comparing Bellamy to another actor who plays a stooge to Grant: John Howard in The Philadelphia Story. We remember Bellamy in his stooge roles, but who can even remember Howard, who loses not only to Grant but also for a while to James Stewart? Bellamy had a long, long career: He made his first movie in 1931 and his last, Pretty Woman, in 1990, a year before his death at the age of eighty-seven. In 1933 he was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, but from 1945 until 1960 his career was spent largely on stage and TV. From 1952 to 1964 he served as president of Actors' Equity, the union that represents theatrical performers, and at the height of anti-communist hysteria was responsible for preventing the blacklist from imposing itself on the theater, which became a refuge for blacklisted film actors and screenwriters. He won a Tony award in 1958 for his performance as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, a role that he re-created for the 1960 film version. His film career had a late revival in a handful of memorable roles: as the sinister Dr. Sapirstein in Rosemary's Baby and as one of the Duke brothers in the Eddie Murphy movies Trading Places and Coming to America. He reportedly turned down the role of Noah Cross in Chinatown, leaving the part open for John Huston's memorable performance. He received an honorary award from the Academy in 1987 "for his unique artistry and his distinguished service to the profession of acting." 

Ralph Bellamy, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth

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Best Actor, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous.  
Giving Tracy a permanent wave (Joan Crawford said he looked like Harpo Marx) and having him call the plummy-voiced English tyke Freddie Bartholomew "Leetle Feesh" may not have been the worst thing to happen to an Irishman since the Battle of the Boyne, but it certainly wasn't Tracy's best role or performance. Still, it won him his first Oscar. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Cary Grant in The Awful Truth. 


 Why Grant wasn't nominated for this movie, when his co-star Irene Dunne was, and even Ralph Bellamy landed a supporting actor nomination, is one of the abiding mysteries of the Oscars. Grant received only two nominations, for the tear-jerking Penny Serenade (also with Dunne) and the plodding None But the Lonely Heart. Eventually, the Academy got around to giving him a consolation prize, an honorary award, but his mastery of both screwball and sophisticated comedy was unequaled. In one of the funniest scenes of The Awful Truth, Grant, after a tiff with Dunne, grabs a hat and starts to leave, only to discover, and to demonstrate in several bemused moments before a mirror, that the hat isn't his. No actor on earth, not even Chaplin, could do more with a moment like that than Grant does. Even without a nomination, The Awful Truth was the film that launched Grant into major stardom.   
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