1936: Best Picture

Let's begin this Best Picture talk with a movie that got zero nominations - Ah, Wilderness!. Based upon Eugene O'Neill's only comedy, the film follows a small-town family in 1906, primarily the second son (Eric Linden), a high school senior whose new discoveries in art, intellectualism, and women irritate everyone around him, and the father (Lionel Barrymore), a newspaperman who leads his family patiently. Timeless observations about teen pretensions, familial annoyances, enabling between relatives, and the suspension of time during the Fourth of July. Fine performances, terrific sets and costumes. And it got nothing.

Maybe it was timing. Depending on where you check, it either qualified for the 8th Academy Awards or the 9th Academy Awards. IMDb lists it as a Christmas 1935 release in New York City. Because Academy rules stipulate a film must play one week in LA to be considered, it's possible it did not make it to Los Angeles until January 1936 or later - thus why it shows up on the 1936 Reminder List available at And The Oscar Goes To. But, too, maybe members of the nominating committee were bristling against its history-making Oscar campaign. Never before had a studio had the chutzpah to put out ads begging for awards, but leave it to MGM to lead the charge. 

If indeed it was 1935, then while the Ah, Wilderness! campaign was unsuccessful, Leo still got a trophy when Mutiny on the Bounty won. If it was 1936...Leo still got a trophy when The Great Ziegfeld won. I guess the Academy felt Leo was ready to receive after all!

Including MGM's winning showbiz epic, here are the ten nominees for Best Picture...starting from my tenth favorite and finishing on my winning pick:

1936: Actress

Used to be, the Academy Awards were a celebratory evening of dinner and dancing. The winners were announced to the press in advance and the awards were distributed close to the end of the evening. The 9th ceremony was held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and it is this ceremony that gets the showcase treatment when you visit the hotel's historic corridor:

My sister took that photo during her visit last weekend. You can see Cecil B. DeMille, Henry Fonda, Walt Disney. And on the lefthand side, the table on the dance floor draped in white, the figure wearing white - is that year's Best Actress Oscar winner, Luise Rainer. She almost didn't make it, preferring to spend the evening at home with her husband, playwright Clifford Odets. Indeed, all her rivals were at the ceremony already when news of her win trickled up from the press room. Inside Oscar reports that Gladys George, silent film star nominated for her big comeback turn in Valiant is the Word for Carrie, was inconsolable. It also reports that studio brass got on the horn and demanded Rainer get her ass down there so she could accept the Oscar in front of the cameras. And so:

Rainer's is a long and interesting life. German by birth, she became a stage star under the tutelage of Max Reinhardt (he who gave us 1935's A Midsummer Night's Dream). Emigrating to the United States as Hitler rose to power, she took the leading lady part in Escapade, starring...William Powell! Indeed, she was cast as a replacement for his frequent co-star Myrna Loy. She credited Powell with championing her in early Hollywood, teaching her how to adjust her talents for the camera. That partnership led directly to their reteaming in The Great Ziegfeld, with Myrna Loy appearing as the woman who replaces Rainer in Ziegfeld's life. Following a second consecutive win for The Good Earth, Rainer soon became disillusioned with Hollywood and MGM, feeling Louis B. Mayer did not have the same taste as recently-deceased Irving Thalberg. Her film credits end at 1941, and she appeared sporadically in television for the next sixty years. For a while, she was the oldest living Oscar winner, passing away in 2014 at the age of 104! And she was still giving interviews!

Does her performance hold up? Let's talk:

1936: Director

The second week of 1936 begins! Last week, we talked some nominees, specifically ones for Dance Direction, Original Song, Score, and the Writing Awards. This week starts with the nominees for Best Director.

In only its ninth year, Oscar showed it couldn't stop repeating itself. Already, two-time winners in this category were made up of Frank Borzage (1927/28, 1931/32), Lewis Milestone (1927/28, 1929/30), and Frank Lloyd (1928/29, 1932/33). Another Frank joined the ranks: having already won for It Happened One Night in 1934, Capra won his second Academy Award for directing Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Capra, by the way, was also the Academy president at the time, had expanded categories to appease the actors union, and was one of the newly-formed 50-person nominating committee allowing certain representatives of certain branches to decide the full lineup. But I'm sure the win wasn't all political - Capra's much-admired to this day, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was popular with critics (Graham Greene himself gave it a favorable review) and audiences (it was Capra's most profitable film up to the time, #7 at the int'l box office).

My thoughts on Capra's work, as well as that of his fellow nominees, after the jump:

1936: Writing Awards

The dance and music categories are done. We move on to the writing awards. One is Original Story, which honored the original concepts dreamed up by writers, not all of whom would get to translate their stories into script form. The other is Screenplay, honoring authors of scripts that were either based on pre-existing works, such as novels, plays, and short stories, or working off of one of the aforementioned Original Stories.

In 1936, the story of both categories was a single film. Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney were nominated both for their concept of how to depict the life of Louis Pasteur for film and for their script executing that idea. They won both. It was the first and last time either man would be nominated. Collings died of pneumonia in 1937, six months after winning his Oscars; it is believed he pawned one of them out of desperation, a nervous breakdown and descent into alcoholism having kept him from work. Gibney would later be blacklisted, though he served as president of the Writers Guild - twice!

Their winning work and the nominees they went up against after the jump.

1936: Dance Direction

The short-lived category of Dance Direction was inaugurated for the 1935 Academy Awards. They continued through into the 1936 ceremony, and that is what we discuss today. 

At this time, a committee of 50 decided the nominees in each category. While most categories kept their limit to five nominees, for some reason - possibly a tie or compromise? - Dance Direction's lineup was seven-wide.  That's one tic more than Original Song, which suggests to me that this committee liked a musical number.

The nominees: