The Winners - The 1940 Retro Hollmann Awards

You've seen the Top Ten and the nominees - now, the winners:

The 1940 Retro Hollmann Awards Nominees!

I watched 82 films. I gave you my Top Ten. Here are my personal nominees in 18 categories. There are 33 films represented. At least two individuals have three or more nominations. All four of this year's Oscar-winning actors are here, but not how you might think. 

(And if this is your first time: I do not separate the "craft" categories by black-and-white and color, I maintain only the Original and Adapted writing categories, and I include three categories that were not present at the 1940 Oscars: Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Ensemble.)

Read on for the 1940 Retro Hollmann Award Nominees...

My Top Ten of 1940

These were the 82 films screened:

Abe Lincoln in Illinois

All This, and Heaven Too

American Matchmaker

Angels Over Broadway

Arise, My Love

Arizona

Behind the News

Bitter Sweet

Black Friday

The Blue Bird

Boom Town

The Boys from Syracuse

Brigham Young

Broadway Melody of 1940

Captain Caution

Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum

Charlie Chan in Panama

Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise

Christmas in July

Comrade X

The Dark Command

Destry Rides Again

Dr. Cyclops

Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet

Down Argentine Way

Edison, the Man

The Fight for Life

Foreign Correspondent

Go West

The Grapes of Wrath

The Great Dictator

The Great McGinty

Green Hell

His Girl Friday

Hit Parade of 1941

The House of the Seven Gables

The Howards of Virginia

The Human Monster

The Invisible Man Returns

Irene

Johnny Apollo

Kitty Foyle

The Letter

Lillian Russell

The Long Voyage Home

The Mark of Zorro

The Mummy's Hand

Murder Over New York

Music in My Heart

My Favorite Wife

My Little Chickadee

My Son, My Son!

New Moon

North West Mounted Police

Northwest Passage

One Million B.C.

Our Town

The Philadelphia Story

Pinocchio

Pride and Prejudice

Primrose Path

Rebecca

Remember the Night

Rhythm on the River

Road to Singapore

The Sea Hawk

Second Chorus

The Shop Around the Corner

Spring Parade

Strike Up the Band

Swiss Family Robinson

Tevya

They Drive By Night

They Knew What They Wanted

The Thief of Bagdad

Tin Pan Alley

Too Many Husbands

Typhoon

Waterloo Bridge

The Westerner

Women in War

You'll Find Out

Of those 82 films, I whittled it down to 18, including Brigham Young, Christmas in July, Destry Rides Again, Johnny Apollo, The Long Voyage Home, The Mark of Zorro, The Shop Around the Corner. and, my #11 pick, The House of the Seven Gables.

Here are my alphabetized Top Ten films of 1940:

Oscar 1940: Best Director

The thread through this month's retrospective, next month's, and July's is: The Winner Is John Ford. 

February 1st marked the 130th birthday of the director whose work inspired and influenced Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Satoshi Kon, and countless others. His body of work encompasses over 140 films across a span of about sixty years, comprised of documentaries, westerns, war films, romances, coming-of-age dramas, biopics, a disaster film, and even a Shirley Temple vehicle. He immortalized Arizona's Monument Valley. He has been, over the years, embraced and rejected by progressives and conservatives alike. 

And he won four Academy Awards for Best Director, the most by any filmmaker, ever. His first was for 1935's The Informer; the second came in 1940, for his adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both novel and film courted controversy with their frank depictions of the effect the Great Depression had on the population, the callous repossession of long-held family farms by banks, the exploitation of desperate workers by greedy employers, and the need for the people to organize. Both novel and film were also huge successes. Contemporary, artful, and a moneymaker? You better believe they gave that man an Oscar.

I imagine his biggest competitors were the directors behind the three bigger moneymakers: Alfred Hitchcock, whose adaptation of Rebecca landed #3 at the box office and won Best Picture and Best Cinematography (Black-and-White); George Cukor, whose adaptation of The Philadelphia Story landed #4 at the box office and won Best Actor and Best Screenplay; and Sam Wood, whose adaptation of Kitty Foyle landed #10 at the box office and won Best Actress. William Wyler - historically, the most-nominated Best Director with twelve (and three wins, all for Best Picture winners!) - was also up, for his adaptation of The Letter.

The men:

Oscar 1940: Best Actress

My goodness, back in 1940, Best Actress and Best Picture were really linked! This was and is a rarity - let's not forget, the Best Actress race for 2021 had zero women in Best Picture nominees, so 5/5 is insane. Unheard of. Even 1939 and 1941 were both just shy at 4/5, but for this one year, what made five of the Best Pictures of the Year work were the lead female performances at the center.

Those performances? Two veterans (Davis & Hepburn). Two reprising their Broadway hits (Hepburn & Scott). One getting the Selznick ingenue treatment (Fontaine). But only one winner. Yes, even though it wasn't for the movies that made her famous (and still remain her best-known), Ginger Rogers, star of Top Hat and Swing Time, would forever be an Oscar winner.

These were those performances:

Oscar 1940: Best Supporting Actor

What makes a performance a supporting one? The answer may seem obvious - a supporting performer is not the lead - but as longtime Oscare observers know, such is not really the case. Back then the categories were specifically made to honor character actors, and while some could grow into stars, often a character actor was a character actor was a character actor. We've talked about it before with both of Edmund Gwenn's nominations and we'll talk about it again next month for 1941 for Charles Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones. But here is a lineup where fully 3/5 could be argued as Leading Men. 

One of those was Walter Brennan, the only nominee here who'd been here before and the only one who would return. Brennan's two previous nominations resulted in wins. So did this, the first actor to win three.

It was figured this was due to the Extras Guild, who had voting power in the Academy at the time and who counted Brennan as one of their own, a man who went from extra to featured extra to bit player and on and on until...well, here he is! Anyway, they were stripped of voting privileges after this.

But Extras Guild or not, was that win deserved? Let's talk: 

Oscar 1940: Best Original Song

Nine nominees for Best Original Song? From 1940-1945, the idea of five nominees per category was anathema to the Academy. Best Picture sometimes had twelve contenders, Original Score had seventeen nominees in 1940 alone; only Directing, Acting, and Writing categories had no more than five consistently. Still, nine is a weird number, particularly when the lineup doesn't even include hits by Cole Porter and only one song from Pinocchio. Perhaps that was better for Disney's odds: "When You Wish Upon a Star" triumphed, becoming the first of eleven Disney films to win in this category. The other eight nominees represent a time when a musical was as common as an action blockbuster is today. The stars of the screen are the sa

Let's have a listening party, ranking the songs from my personal #9 to my personal #1: