The 1932 Oscars, the last November Ceremony
Sunday, November 18, 2018 at 10:30AM The 5th Academy Awards were held on this day (November 18th) in history, 86 long years ago. I bring this up because it's quite a year in Oscar history full of firsts (and lasts!) and cool trivia. Let's recap, shall we?
Wallace Beery (left) and Fredric March (right) tied for Best Actor
First & Last Times For...
A Best Picture winner with only one nomination!
The soapy and delicious all star ensemble pic Grand Hotel won despite no other nominations, a figure that's often been cited as a dubious achievement but isn't unthinkable with actual context; there were only 7 regular categories a film could be nominated in back then, unlike 17 today (the number of categories currently stands at 24 but the others are for foreign/animated/doc/shorts and, of course, a film cannot be nominated in both screenplay categories). And there were less nominees in the categories, too. This made nomination counts for Best Pictures much smaller (there weren't even supporting categories yet where Grand Hotel surely would have been nominated -- hellooooo one of Joan Crawford's best performances!). Here was how it shook out...
Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel
- Arrowsmith (4 noms)
- Bad Girl (3 noms, winning for Director and Adaptation)
- The Champ (4 noms, winning for Actor and Screenplay)
- Five Star Final (Best Pic nom only)
- Grand Hotel (Best Pic nom only, WINNER)
- One Hour With You (Best Pic nom only)
- Shanghai Express (3 noms, winning for Cinematography)
- The Smiling Lieutenant (Best Pic nom only)
But the Grand Hotel win is still a bit strange even within the context of 1932. Consider that the classic father/son tearjerker The Champ had a lot of widespread support. It received 4 nominations including Picture and Director and won for both acting and writing, prizes that often go with Best Picture winners. The other nomination leader Arrowsmith was a medical drama from John Ford (who would soon become Oscar's favorite director), but it lost all of its nominations (Picture, Adaptation, Cinematography, Art Direction).
A Best Actor tie
This ceremony also had Oscar's first and only tie in Best Actor, with Fredric March (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) both winning. It's one of only two ties in the acting categories, the other being the great Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn face/off of 1968. [Sidebar: There have been six ties in Oscar history: Actor (1932), Documentary Short (1949), Actress (1968), Documentary Feature (1986), Live Action Short (1994) and Sound Editing (2012). They happen about once every 18 years!]
An Oscar winning Von Sternberg / Dietrich film
Director Josef von Sternberg & Marlene Dietrich are one of the all time great director/muse pairings making 7 classics together. But Shanghai Express is their only film together to win an Oscar (Best Cinematography for Lee Garmes). Morocco (1930) had previously been nominated for four categories (Dietrich, Sternberg, Garmes were recognized along with Production Designer Hans Dreier) but lost them all. The Academy totally ignored their other collaborations: The Blue Angel, Blonde Venus, Dishonored, The Devil is a Woman, and The Scarlet Empress.
First of Many !
Honoring Walt Disney
This was the first ceremony to honor Walt Disney. He was nominated twice in "Short Subject, Cartoons" winning for Flowers and Trees and was also given an Honorary Oscar for the creation of Mickey Mouse. He'd continue to be an Oscar favorite his whole life. He won 22 times, the most for any person, living or dead. What Meryl Streep is to acting nominations, he is to wins; nobody else even comes close.
Frances Marion was best friends with silent film superstar Mary Pickford. In the silent era Marion was making $50,000 a year writing movies for Pickford. Adjusted for inflation that's like $800,000 a year today! Nice work if you can get it.
Happy Birthday To Her!
Winning on Your Birthday
I can't confirm how many times this has happened since but the screenwriter Frances Marion, who had come to great fame writing Mary Pickford silent hits, won for The Champ on her 44th birthday. Though the Oscars had only been around for five years it was her second win. She also won for The Big House in 1930, the first female writer to win an Oscar. [Sidebar: Marion is one of only two women to win multiple Oscars for writing. The other is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for A Room With a View and Howards End.]
Last Time
Sound Recording
This category is now what's known as Best Sound Mixing. In its second year (1931) the Academy decided (for reasons unbeknownst to us) that the nominees would be studios instead of individual movies. That decision lasted just two years with Paramount winning both times. After this ceremony, the category would go to being about individual movies; Oscar was still trying to figure things out in the tumultous first ten years or so.
Greta Garbo in "Grand Hotel"November Ceremony
Finally, this was the last Oscars to be held in November, the Academy then moving to the more sensible January-December calendar year eligibility system (sort of... the 1933 Oscars had to include some of 1932 to get caught up). Starting with the 1934 film year the ceremony would then always be held in either February, March or April for the next eighty-plus years.
P.S. In conclusion see Shanghai Express (or any von Sternberg/Dietrich movie, really) and Grand Hotel if you haven't. As we've mentioned before Grand Hotel is a lot of fun and ultra-glam.
Reader Comments (24)
Was Greta Garbo not Oscar-worthy for Grand Hotel? That always seemed like a slam-dunk nom that wasn’t.
Grand Hotel is such a great movie. Joan would definitely win supporting that year although the idea of Crawford winning for supporting of all things seems wrong.
Also, I don't remember the source, but apparently, the best actor tie was not a literal tie. March beat Beery by one vote and according to the rules at the time it counted as a tie. There was some fuss but no one wanted to tell Beery about it since he had a violent temper so they just let him keep it but changed the rules afterward so now only literal ties can happen.
Tom G.: You're right - March beat Beery by one vote. The rule was that anyone who came within three votes of the winner should be declared a winner too - a rule that, as you say, was quickly revised.
Great piece, Nat. I don't know how many other times it happened but Jennifer Jones famously won her Oscar on her 25th birthday.
Not sure of the birthday state but I'm sure we'd all rather Emmanuelle Riva won for Amour as the ceremony was held on her birthday
I'm sadly unfamiliar with alot of thirties film but Grand Hotel and Shanghai Express are great.
Fredric March is still the best Jekyll and Hyde. I'm surprise that Hugh Jackman has not made a movie version of the musical it would be a perfect part for him
Shanghai Express clearly should have won, such a delirious masterpiece of atmosphere, but Grand Hotel still holds up. I also love the two Ernst Lubitsch nominees The Smiling Lieutenant (with the risque song "Jazz Up Your Lingerie", which Claudette Colbert sagely advises Miriam Hopkins) and One Hour with You w/George Cukor and featuring all rhyming dialogue. The win for Frank Borzage as Best Director for the utterly forgettable Bad Girl over Josef von Sternberg's brilliant artistry in Shanghai Express is incomprehensible.
@Joe- Jennifer Jones apologized to Ingrid Bergman for winning the award on her birthday. Ingrid said Jennifer's Bernadette was better than her Maria.
Kudos to whatever director makes the next truly great all-star cast movie. It's a shame those don't work out very often, Oceans movies aside (because that's just their thing).
Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne were the first couple to get Oscar nominations for acting, the same year. And for the same film (The Guardsman)!
Ah what a gorgeous year. Imagine being alive when Garbo and Dietrich were making movies.
I'm the only classic film nerd gay in the world who doesn't particularly care for Joan Crawford. But I agree she was great in Grand Hotel. It's her best performance, give or take The Women
Grand Hotel itself is of course great fun, as is Shanghai Express, as is Jekyll and Hyde (the best version and the best lead), though I might just prefer Smiling Lieutenant to all of them. Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins (a great, great, sadly underused and now rarely talked about actress) trading top shelf innuendo in art deco sets is my personal idea of heaven...
Crawford n Dietrich shld've been nom for Best Actress! Esp considering tt thr's only 3 nominees tt ceremony.
Sternberg shld've won Best Diretor, n Edmund Goulding shld've been nim for Grand Hotel. He was a top notch director working w many A list actresses, like Shearer, Garbo, Crawford n Bette in the 30s n 40s. It's strange he was nev nom..
On Grand Hotel, I'm on the fence on Garbo, I'm a HUGE fan but O fwlt her perf is soo mannered n stiff, Crawford is the one who took the pic n ran away w it!!
Joan Crawford plays off the entire cast beautifully in Grand Hotel and gives the best performance (worthy of a Supporting Actress win if there had been one). I usually find Garbo compelling, but this is the rare case where I find her annoying and excessive.
With the odd way the years were split at this point in Academy history, I'm not sure if it made the cut-off, but Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match was worthy of a nomination. Bette Davis fades into the background with a tissue-paper-thin character, and Joan Blondell is Joan Blondell, but Dvorak gets the meaty scenes and nails them. She should have been a bigger star.
Love the post and agree "Grand Hotel" is fantastic and I am glad it won.
Joan Crawford is stunning in Grand Hotel. Stealing a movie from Garbo is no small feat. What a shame the supporting categories weren’t around yet.
Also, Fredric March’s two Oscar-winning roles could not be more dissimilar, yet he’s amazing in both.
Crawford would've been a fantastic Best Actress winner for this film. Heck, even for Rain, which I think is the same year. Such a strong year and no nom.
The blog wonderful Oscar Obsession takes us to movies and actors and artists we'd hardly get in touch. Beery and March are also great in comedy. Beery in Dinner at Eight(1933), another MGM allstar - he is married to and tormented by the best annoying dumb blonde of Jean Harlow. In I Married a Witch(1942) March is pursued bravely by the blondest Veronica Lake, the witch of the title.
Tom G - If you had read the wonderful Inside Oscar, you would have seen the claim that Katherine Hepburn beat Barbra Streisand by ONE VOTE. The one vote that helped Barbra tie with Katherine came from Barbra herself. Barbra was granted membership of the Academy even though she had not made a film. Having said that may I say I am a HUUUUUGE fan of both Barbra and Katherine. I am just pointing this out because some people claimed that Barbra should not have won for Funny Girl (a wonderful film BTW).
@Tom G- I knew about that, too. I think they were friends and that Jones presented Bergman with her Best Actress win the following year.
Bette & Tom G -- i find that argument so suspect each time i hear it. It's not like Katharine Hepburn didn't also vote for herself ;) they just tied period.
Do you think Katherine Hepburn even bothered to vote for the Oscars? She never showed up to collect her Oscars, so the Oscars clearly weren't all that important to her.
It is funny to me that her not showing gave the *appearance* that only Barbra Streisand won since she was the lone woman on the stage (in that unforgettable ensemble). Hello, gorgeous.
@ Bette- Yes I knew about Katharine and Barbara. She got a lot of flack over that one vote. But it would be so hard to choose between them. They are the career topping performances of both actresses.
Bette and Tom, do you know of any other instances of a reformer givien membership without having made a film? Was it especially strange, or an occasional occurrence?
I'm not aware. I think Gregory Peck was president at the time so he gave Barbara her chance to vote.