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.