Best Motion Picture of the Year: 1931-32, Day Fourteen

The Fifth Academy Awards was the place for screen history: movie debuts, ties, and the one trivia piece everyone gets a kick out of, Grand Hotel winning Best Picture with no other nominations.

What's funny about that Grand Hotel bit is...it wasn't the only lone Best Picture nominee. Of the eight films competing, four were unnominated elsewhere. In addition to the ensemble drama Grand Hotel, there was Five Star Final, about a tabloid ruining the life of a woman trying to get her life back on track; One Hour with You, a musical-comedy in which a happily married couple find their marital bliss threatened by the wife's best friend; and The Smiling Lieutenant, a musical-comedy in which a lieutenant merrily living in sin with a female orchestra leader finds himself betrothed to the princess of a small nation. It's a curious mix of loners, especially alongside based-on-a-bestseller Arrowsmith, two-time Oscar winner Bad Girl, hit weepie The Champ, and dangerously sexy Shanghai Express. So let's talk about it!

Best Actor: 1931-32, Day Twelve

Norma Shearer presented the award for Best Actor - and to go by Inside Oscar, it was an exciting way to present it. She did the nominees, then the winner was revealed via an audio clip from their performance as the star's photograph was projected behind Norma. Fredric March accepted...and then some time later, the ballot-counters realized that there was only a three point difference between two of the nominees. According to the rules of the time, that meant...A TIE!

Wallace Beery went up a little late, but he accepted his Best Actor trophy. It was the first of only six times this happened, and the first of only twice in the acting categories. Beery and March had just adopted children, so March made a joke about them winning for "best male performance," ha-ha. The third nominee, Alfred Lunt, probably would've felt crunchy about it had he cared. He and his wife Lynn Fontanne were both up for Academy Awards for The Guardsman, recreating their hit stage roles; both also declined MGM contracts so that they could return to treading the boards in New York.

The nominees:

Best Director: 1931-32, Day Eleven

Five years in, and already the Academy was repeating itself!

The nominees for Best Director, 1931-32, had all been here before. Josef von Sternberg had just been nominated the previous year for Morocco, when he lost to Skippy's Norman Taurog. King Vidor was on his third go-round, having been previously nominated at the Third Academy Awards for the all-Black musical Hallelujah, which he lost to Lewis Milestone for All Quiet on the Western Front, and at the First Academy Awards, where he was nominated for The Crowd. The man he lost to, the first-ever winner for Best Director, was none other than Frank Borzage, nominated then for Seventh Heaven.

And now we have Borzage on his second nomination, for Bad Girl. And guess what? He won again! Two for two? Not so bad, Mr. Borzage. But let's take a closer look, shall we?

Best Original Story: 1931-32, Day Nine

On November 18, 1932, the Motion Picture Academy held its fifth annual awards show at the Ambassador Hotel in the heart of what is now Los Angeles' Koreatown. Academy President Conrad Nagel (an actor whos appeared in five films released during the eligibility window, none of which were nominared or seen by yours truly) was the Master of Ceremonies; he also presented the Short Subject awards as well as a Special Award to walt Disney, for the creation of Mickey Mouse. All that business followed the awarding of Sci-Tech Awards, Sound Recording, Interior Decoration, and Cinematography. And then the writing awards, presented by Howard Estabrook.

Estabrook was the reigning winner of the Best Adaptation Academy Award, which he received for Best Picture Cimarron. I don't know which writing category came first, but I'm starting with....Original Story. Not screenplay, mind you: story. Adaptation and Dialogue were often credited to different writers than the story, a holdover, I imagine, from the scenarist days of silent film. Starting in 1940, there were three writing awards: Story, Story and Screenplay, and Screenplay (for adaptations and screenplays not written by the original scenarist). Things were simplified after the awards for 1956, and from then on, it was just Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay.

That is now, but this was then. The four (?!) nominees for Original Story, 1931-32, were:

In the Months Ahead...

Powering down in September to focus on back-to-back retrospectives.

In November, we'll look at the films of 1970, featuring these Best Picture nominees:

But first, in October, it's the cinema of August 1, 1931-July 31, 1932 - the Fifth Academy Awards - featuring these Best Picture nominees:

See y'all in October!

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