Day Ten: Best Picture, 1954

The 1954 Academy Awards gave nominations to several stone-cold classics: On the Waterfront, Sabrina, Rear Window, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Star is Born, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. As usual, the Best Picture lineup does not 100 percent reflect that, though The Caine Mutiny is, I suppose arguable (just because I don't like it doesn't mean it's not a classic).

So, what do we have? The Caine Mutiny, in which a Navy crew rebels against their captain after he shows clear signs of mental instability. The Country Girl, in which a hot-shot Broadway director hires a washed-up alcoholic actor for a show, only to lock horns with, and inexplicably fall for, exhausted wife. On the waterfront, in which an ex-boxer working the  waterfront must choose between naming names of corrupt union bosses...or keeping quiet and allowing innocent men to die. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a musical about wild mountain men getting tamed by their brother's wife. And Three Coins in the Fountain, about romance for three American women living in Rome.

For the Academy, and many others, was clear:

As for me? Follow the jump....

Day Eight: Best Supporting Actor, 1954

And then there were three...nominees from a single movie, that is! On the Waterfront holds the distinction of being the first film to take up 60% of the Best Supporting Actor category. A rare enough feat that it only happened again twice: for 1972's The Godfather (Caan, Duvall, Pacino) and 1974's The Godfather Part II (De Niro, Gazzo, Strasberg). Please note all the overlap: the Best Actor winner for both 1954 and 1972 was Marlon Brando, for On the Waterfront and The Godfather, respectively; Michael V. Gazzo made his film debut in a bit part in On the Waterfront; Lee Strasberg was director of the Actors Studio from 1951-1982, an organization co-founded by Waterfront director Elia Kazan that boasted among its alumnae...basically everyone I just named. 

As I say, On the Waterfront was the first and The Godfather Part II was the last to go for three-for-five in Best Supporting Actor. But it did happen once before in the Best Leading Actor category. In 1935, all three male leads for Best Picture winner Mutiny on the Bounty were nominated: Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Franchot Tone. The next year, separate categories for supporting players were introduced. Oh, and in 1963, Best Picture winner Tom Jones got three supporting actress nominations: Diane Cilento, Dame Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman.

This much we can take to the bank: three acting nods in one category means your movie's winning Best Picture. But it also means one of the other two nominees is going home with the Oscar. Only once has a nominee from the threesome won, and that was Robert De Niro speaking Italian while "doing" Marlon Brando. In 1954, the honor went to Edmond O'Brien of The Barefoot Contessa - the only nominee from a film not up for Best Picture:

The nominees are:

Day Seven: The Scores, 1954

Is there any branch more exclusive than the Music one? In looking up the usual trivia of previous nominees, past winners, etc., I found that of the thirteen composers nominated - and I'm including both Musical and Non-Musical categories - all but two were either previous nominees, previous winners, or on their first of many nominations. Only Larry Adler and Leonard Bernstein, both up for Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, were one-and-dones, though it's worth noting that Saul Chaplin, a co-winner for Scoring of a Musical Picture, would once again triumph in that same category for co-adapting Bernstein's West Side Story compositions for the cinema.

The nominees after the jump, starting with the non-musicals....

Day Five: Best Actor, 1954

I have no way of knowing this for certain - I wasn't there, I don't have access to archives - but historians tell us that Bing Crosby was the favorite to win for his performance as a recovering alcoholic in The Country Girl. It seems bonkers now, considering Crosby was already an Oscar winner for Going My Way in 1944, while Marlon Brando was not only in the Best Picture frontrunner, but had been accumulating momentum with three previous, unsuccessful nominations, all in consecutive years: 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire, 1952's Viva Zapata!, and 1953's Julius Caesar. Not to mention it was a rematch against Humphrey Bogart, whose win for The African Queen came the same year as A Streetcar Named Desire. Plus, he had already swept what we now call "the precursors." But there you have it - the results were a shock, an upset:

Just another example of how times have changed as far as Oscar narratives, momentum, and expectations go. Anyway, the nominees were:

Day Two: Best Screenplay, 1954

Until 1957, the Academy Awards had three writing categories: Best Motion Picture Story honored original stories (obviously) as written in the treatment stage, but not the final screenplay; Best Story & Screenplay honored original works where the story and screenplay came from the same writer or writing team; and Best Screenplay honored the work of writers either adapting another work, such as a play or novel, or writing the script from the original story. Often it was more the former than the latter, and this year is no exception: two Broadway shows, two short stories, and a novel that was simultaneously adapted into a Broadway show while the film version was in production.

The nominees are...