The 1st Academy Awards had three nominees for Outstanding Production (plus another three for Artistic Quality of Production, though the Academy only acknowledges Outstanding Production as the first Best Picture nominees). The field expanded very shortly after: the 2nd-4th Academy Awards had five nominees; the 5th had eight; the 6th had ten; the 7th and 8th had twelve; and things seemed settled when the ten-wide Best Picture lineup lasted from the 9th Academy Awards through the 16th Academy Awards.
Come 1944, a new shakeup: five nominees for Best Picture, no more and no less, a tradition that lasted over 60 years and ended with the ten-wide selection of the 82nd Academy Awards. This, even as the individual Music categories (Score, Musical Score, Song) were tallying anywhere between 11 and 21 nominees! For the inaugural year of this new standard, which for many of us is still the standard (damn the past 18 years!), these were the nominees:
Paramount Pictures
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Paramount Pictures
Selznick International
20th Century-Fox
A noir about an insurance agent who is wrapped up in a murder plot with an undeniable dame. A thriller about a newlywed whose husband may be purposely driving her mad for his own purposes. A light comedy about a young priest and an old priest clashing. A wartime drama about the experiences of the wives and children back home. A biopic about the President of the United States who dreamed of a united world and was castigated for it.
We’ve discussed elements of each of these films, and so I’ve linked their tags so that you can see everything I had to say about them beforehand. And now, my rankings, from fifth to first:
5. Going My Way
Paramount Pictures
ten Academy Award nominations, seven wins
I stand by saying that Fitzgerald succeeds at the job he’s tasked with, and that Crosby is charming and the whole reason one should like Going My Way...that is, if one was to like Going My Way. I do not. I find it unfocused and largely unfunny. I find that its occasional dips into the current conversation - the generation gap, the war - are cynically and superficially executed. I find the way it ends on a guaranteed note of tears - Christmas Eve and somehow Father O’Malley gets Father Flanagan’s ancient mother, who he hasn’t seen in decades, over to the US - I find that overly calculated. It is a manufactured story and script that can’t make up its mind about being a musical, and which suddenly throws in a golf game in the middle. A stupid, shallow movie, and when people say everything nowadays is slop, I’ll point them to this drivel and say, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
4. Since You Went Away
Selznick International Pictures
nine Academy Award nominations, one win
At least Selznick’s similarly calculated tearjerker about the War at Home has some fine performances to recommend it. Overlong, Selznick confuses length with import, so we must suffer through repetitive and sometimes questionable scenes (I think much of that conversation where Colbert reluctantly fires McDaniel due to strained finances, and McDaniel offers to remain to help for free, despite having a home, family, and other jobs of her own, is odd). It is an all right drama, but not one meriting this runtime, complete with Overture, Entr’acte, and a Jennifer Jones subplot. I could watch it again, but not all at once.
3. Wilson
20th Century-Fox
ten Academy Award nominations, five wins
Its win for Screenplay is a head scratcher, when form and flow are the very things keeping this movie from being great. I was actually reminded of this movie while watching the Michael Jackson biopic Michael: every now and then, a scene, or two scenes!, makes you perk up - “Now, THIS is the movie, we’re finally getting started” - only to return to the highlights reel structure. People flow in and out with little meaning. Much is made of the opposition and criticisms against Wilson - but who and what and why are barely explored. It’s clear from the focus that The League of Nations and the tragedy of its dissolution is the reason this movie was made, but that’s just the last chunk of a 2.5-hour movie, and is over before it feels like it's begun. I would watch it again because it looks great and Alexander Knox is good, but it’s not a movie so much as it is a lecture.
The Top Two are so outrageously superior to the other three, it’s almost offensive. They’re also the only two that don’t feel it necessary to even indirectly reference the War, so perhaps that is why they felt, at the time, like also-rans. Both are thrillers, neither true stories nor testaments to the American spirit, but rather indictments of the greed of man (and woman) and the lengths they will go to get what they want. With Double Indemnity, one could perhaps extrapolate an interpretation of American life during, and a prediction of it post-, war: the women have become dangerously independent, the men who aren't fighting are weak-willed, malleable to whatever promises of carnal satisfaction and ease come their way. Paired with Gaslight, we see a universal truth that also rings true for this particular war: there are wicked people on this earth who are determined to bend circumstances, to bend your own reality, to their will, not only to feel powerful, but to gain materially - and they will be fine orators (as Phyllis and George are), they will tell you what you want, what you desire to hear, and all the time they're plotting your demise, they're on to the next plot already so they can continue to gain and hoard and gain and hoard, every conquest a tribute to themselves, to their cleverness, to their determination not to live as others. George Anton and Phyllis Dietrichson are conning their way through life, and as they bolster their egos and their meager power, they recruit others to goosestep behind them - some fully aware, some with blinders on - carrying out their desires.
Double Indemnity and Gaslight have both transcended their time for a reason. They were able to comment on fascism without cocooning themselves in the specificities many other films of the era did. Gaslight, a 1944 film set in 1875, explores misogyny and spousal abuse in such a contemporary yet timeless fashion that it is still referenced to this day. Double Indemnity, a 1944 adaptation of a 1936 magazine serial, somehow knows that mankind's weaknesses transcend class, era, and occupation, that the combination of insurance fraud, lust, and murder will forever stand the test of time. They both also feature dynamite performances from their ensemble, cinematography so transcendent it feels like they invented it, and scores that heighten the tension without overpowering the films themselves. Each were nominated for seven Academy Awards, yet they also feel, somehow, underrepresented. Where is Double Indemnity in Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor? Where is Gaslight in Best Director or Best Sound Recording?
And where would I rank these two titans of cinema? Thusly:
2. Double Indemnity
Paramount Pictures
seven Academy Award nominations
1. Gaslight
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
seven Academy Award nominations, two wins
Next up, the reason I watched all these movies in the first place - the nominees for Best Director: Alfred Hitchcock (Lifeboat), Henry King (Wilson), Leo McCarey (Going My Way), Otto Preminger (Laura), and Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity).
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