Best Actress 1952 was a year with a clear runaway favorite to win, as only one performance had won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the Golden Globe, the National Board of Review - and, hell, even the Tony Award! The Oscar was just the last step in an inevitable march for Shirley Booth:
Her competition included Susan Hayward, the only actress anyone considered a viable threat; Julie Harris, who also recreated a role she played on Broadway; and, in their only direct competition against each other, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The nominees:
Oscars 1952 was about 25 years of the Academy Awards, about Cecil B. DeMille (in addition to Best Picture, he also received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), and, interestingly, about Gloria Grahame. Five years after her Oscar nomination for Crossfire, Grahame found herself with her busiest slate yet, four films that showcased her range. In The Greatest Show on Earth, she's the straightforward but good-hearted elephant tamer, a tough cookie but vulnerable - and knows a good man when she sees one. In Macao, she's a gangster's opportunistic sidepiece who tosses in with the hero when she realizes how expendable she might be. In Sudden Fear, she's a gal on the make who realizes, alongside Jack Palance, there's a potential fortune to be made in murder. And in The Bad and the Beautiful, she's the dizzy Southern wife of an author wooed to Hollywood by Kirk Douglas's manipulative producer, who entices her away from hubby and into the arms of a Latin lothario... More comic in pitch than the other roles, it's the one that got her the Oscar:
How does it stand against the others in this category? That's why we're here...
This comes a day late because I needed to organize and better express my thoughts on some of these films. They are thought-provoking. They are entertaining. They are pretty heavy, considering most of them were released on Christmas Day, at least in Los Angeles. Here's how they celebrated Santa and the birth of Christ in 1952:
