Will we ever again get a lone Best Picture nominee? In the first 16 years of the Academy Awards, it happened all the time, starting with the 1928 gangster pic
The Racket at the very first ceremony, when there were only
three official nominees in the category.
Grand Hotel even won Best Picture without being nominated in any other category, one of
four Best Picture nominees that year up for the big prize and nothing else.
And it happened in 1941, with
One Foot in Heaven. Based on a memoir by journalist Hartzell Spence about his Methodist minister father, it follows a family from the parents' marriage through the arrival of children and the attempt to build a community in several places, what with ministers being bounced from place to place as needed by The Church. They deal with the changing world and their own struggle to navigate their own human frailties with the added pressure of elevated status in their community. Why
this film for Best Picture, I do not know. I can't readily find information on its box office and the reviews appear to me to be positive but not overly enthusiastic. Of course, I've also seen the movie, did so before knowing it was a lone Best Picture nominee but - God as my witness, this is the truth - thought, "Well,
this is the kind of movie I can see getting Best Picture and nothing else." An increasingly rare feat, even at the time: the previous
two ceremonies' Best Picture nominees had other nods to boost their profiles; two years after
this,
The Ox-Bow Incident became the last lone Best Picture nominee.
More common, especially with a lineup of ten, is the film with one or two other nominations. That happens even today: Past Lives was only nominated for Picture and Original Screenplay, Women Talking for Picture and Adapted Screenplay (which it won!), Triangle of Sadness for Picture, Director and Original Screenplay...to name but a few. In 1941, this seemed to be the go-to for handling successful crime films, such as The Maltese Falcon or Suspicion. The latter was the follow-up to the previous year's Best Picture winner Rebecca, with the same director Alfred Hitchcock, the same star Joan Fontaine, even a similar plot with the spinster who falls for a man with secrets, though this time it's Cary Grant instead of Laurence Olivier. A commercial hit and winner of critics' prizes before the nominations, it's not entirely surprising that it found its way here, though it may be surprising that its only other nominations were for Best Actress (which it won!) and Best Score.
Funny, to think that they're the only Best Picture nominees among the nine November releases below, yet they share the same number of nominations as five of them. Here they are:
