Showing posts with label The Magnificent Ambersons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Magnificent Ambersons. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
This Above All. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little.

(Color)  
My Gal Sal. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little. 

Winning Oscars in the same year for both color and black-and-white films is something of a tour de force for the 20th Century-Fox design team. And the films were very different: This Above All is a romance set in wartime London with AWOL soldier Tyrone Power being converted to patriotism by WAAF Joan Fontaine. My Gal Sal is one of Fox's countless turn-of-the-century musicals, in which songwriter Paul Dresser (Victor Mature) falls in love with singer Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth). Naturally, he writes a song about her. In real life, Sal was a prostitute Dresser had known in his youth, but no one expects fidelity to the truth in a Fox musical biopic, even when it purports to be based on the memoirs of Dresser's brother, the novelist Theodore Dreiser. Hayworth, whose singing voice is dubbed by Nan Wynn, replaced a pregnant Alice Faye in the role. These were numbers four and five in Day's seven Oscars, and the second and third of Little's six. They were the only wins for Wright, who was nominated ten more times.  

Lobby card for My Gal Sal 
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
The Magnificent Ambersons. Art Direction: Albert S. D'Agostino; Interior Decoration: Darrell Silvera, Al Fields.

The fin de siècle sets for the Amberson mansion are among the most convincing period re-creations in an era when Hollywood had few scruples about verisimilitude. Orson Welles said that Anne Baxter's grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited the set and was appalled by their gloomy clutter -- precisely what his own domestic architecture had aimed at ending. Welles had been disappointed by the snow scenes in Citizen Kane because you couldn't see the actors' breath, so he had the snow scenes in Ambersons staged in a Los Angeles icehouse, which had been used for Lost Horizon and would be used again by D'Agostino for The Thing From Another World in 1951. The Amberson mansion exterior would be reused too, in It's a Wonderful Life. D'Agostino, who took over as head of the RKO art department when Van Nest Polglase moved to Columbia, was nominated five times, but never won. Silvera had seven nominations and no wins, but Fields won for his work on Blood on the Sun. 

Sets in Welles's films usually had ceilings, providing a sense of confinement in this low-angle, deep-focus shot of Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Holt ascends a staircase in the Amberson mansion
Holt and Anne Baxter in the skating scene, filmed in a Los Angeles icehouse
Dolores Costello and Holt in the Ambersons' dining room

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Best Cinematography, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

The Academy was smitten with Mrs. Miniver, and although Ruttenberg's cinematography for it strikes no one today as exceptionally innovative, the Oscar took its place among what would eventually be four, all of them won during his long tenure at MGM. 

(Color) 

Leon Shamroy
 A fairly routine swashbuckler from a novel by Rafael Sabatini, who was kind of a master in the genre. Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara star -- O'Hara in particular was a favorite of color cinematographers because of her bright red hair. This was the first of Shamroy's four wins -- a record tied only by his fellow 1942 cinematography winner, Joseph Ruttenberg. He also has the tie for most nominations -- eighteen -- with Charles B. Lang. A graduate of Columbia in mechanical engineering, Shamroy came west in 1920 and became a technician in the laboratory at Fox. He began experimenting with making movies, and in 1932 signed with Paramount. He moved to 20th Century-Fox in 1938 and spent the remainder of his career there, pioneering the studio's use of color and later its development of the wide-screen process Cinemascope.
Maureen O'Hara and Tyrone Power in The Black Swan 
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

Orson Welles and Stanley Cortez
Stanley Cortez was called Stanislaus Krantz when he was born in New York City, but in Hollywood he changed his name after his actor brother, Jacob Krantz, became a "Latin lover" movie star as Ricardo Cortez. He began as a set designer for still photographers including Edward Steichen, worked as a newsreel cameraman, and served as an assistant to such eminent cinematographers as Karl Struss, Charles Rosher, Lee Garmes, and Arthur Miller before becoming a director of photography on B-pictures at Universal. Ambersons was, in fact, his first major assignment, and he found himself following in the footsteps of Citizen Kane's cinematographer, Gregg Toland. Cortez proved equal to the task, helped along by Orson Welles's newly acquired expertise, especially in Toland's specialty, deep focus. He shared his second Oscar nomination with his mentor Lee Garmes, for Since You Went Away. They were hired after producer David O. Selznick fired the original cinematographer, George Barnes, for not photographing Claudette Colbert to his satisfaction. But Cortez's greatest work as a cinematographer, apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, is probably on The Night of the Hunter, another of those great movies inexplicably ignored by the Academy.  

Cortez's use of light and shadow is essential to the look of The Magnificent Ambersons

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Best Supporting Actress, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

Wright was discovered by Samuel Goldwyn in the cast of Life With Father on Broadway and signed to make her screen debut in The Little Foxes, for which she received her first nomination. A year later she became only the second person to receive simultaneous nominations in both leading and supporting role categories; she was also nominated for her role in The Pride of the Yankees. But aside from Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives, her subsequent films were mostly undistinguished. As she began to outgrow ingenue roles, she spent most of her later career in television. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Always cast in somewhat vinegary roles, such as the spinster Aunt Fanny in Ambersons, Moorehead had begun her career on radio as a singer and actress. This led to her association with Orson Welles as a member of his Mercury Theater Company, including the notorious "War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938. She came with Welles to Hollywood to play the small role of Kane's mother in Citizen Kane, and signed a contract with RKO.  She received three more Oscar nominations, but never won. In later years, she frequently appeared on television, most memorably as Endora, the mother of Elizabeth Montgomery's character, Samantha, on "Bewitched." Moorehead hated being identified with the role. 

Agnes Moorehead as Fanny Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons

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