Showbiz History: The First Televised Oscar Ceremony!
Friday, March 19, 2021 at 8:00AM This one is from our vaults, first published 8 years ago but we're reupping it it with some additional bits of trivia to celebrate March 19th! If it's your birthday today you can brag that you share a birthday with the televised tradition of Oscar ceremonies. This particular ceremony, the 25th Academy Awards, held 68 years ago today was historic for many reasons...
Shirley Booth in NYC accepts her Oscar while the LA crowd looks on
• First, and most importantly, it was he first televised Oscar ceremony ever. It was bi-coastal (which we hear they're trying again this year). Bob Hope entertained the crowd in LA while the great two time Best Actor winner Fredric March (one of the Academy's favourite men) worked the crowd in New York.
• Shirley Booth, who won for Come Back Little Sheba, fell on the steps to the stage! You can watch it here. Jennifer Lawrence didn't invent that little attention grabbing Best Actress move!
Booth (March 53) / Lawrence (February 13)
• Speaking of... Jennifer Lawrence is a typical best actress winner in that they like them young and beautiful and 20something and often when their careers are just beginning to blaze. Shirley Booth was a total anomaly for a long long time. She was the only 50something actress to ever win the top female prize until the Academy finally cried uncle with Julianne Moore for Still Alice (2014).
• The early '50s through the early 70s' was a good era for the Broadway stage since hits often transferred to the screen (instead of the other way around) and sometimes they even brought their Tony winning stage leads with them. It has happened 9 times all told but only twice in the Best Actress category (Anne Bancroft won ten years after Shirley for The Miracle Worker). It would have been thrice but Viola Davis opted to pretend she was supporting in Fences (2016) so she got a Supporting Actress Oscar for the role she won Best Lead Actress for on Broadway.
• 1952 was early enough in Oscar's history that silent film giants were still attending. Note that Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson were at the ceremony for Cecil B. DeMille's win for Best Picture!
• Best Actor winner Gary Cooper (High Noon) wasn't present so John Wayne accepted on his behalf with a tetchy fun speech which ended with him pretending murderous rage that he didn't get to play the High Noon role.
• Gloria Grahame gave what might be the shortest acceptance speech in the history of the Supporting Actress category for one of its briefest roles. (She's only onscreen for 10 minutes). She merely said "thank you very much" as she raced past the microphone!
• One of the most fascinating trivia items about this night is the distribution of the statues. Vincente Minnelli's amazing film The Bad and the Beautiful that we've written about a few times won the most Oscars. That's noteworthy because it's the most statues ever won by a film that wasn't up for Best Picture. It's also one of only two times that a non Best Picture nominee took the most Oscars (the first and only other film to do this was The Thief of Bagdad (1942). High Noon was in second place with 4 trophies but the Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth, to which history has not been kind, only took home two. For many decades The Greatest Show on Earth was the last Best Picture winner to win less than three Oscars but Spotlight (2015) finally changed that trivia note by scoring only two itself.
• It wasn't just in the number of trophies won by Best Picture nominees that this ceremony was notable but how the prizes divvied up. 1952 was an unusually scattered Oscar year. Get this: It is one of only four years in Academy history when Picture, Director and all four acting awards went to completely different films. The other years are 1956, 2005 and 2012... so by that pattern this won't happen again until after I'm dead *sniffle* in the 2070s when it will happen twice in short succession!
RJ Wagner & Terry Moore at the Oscars. RJ in With a Song...
• Terry Moore, Best Supporting Actress nominee that year for Come Back Little Sheba is one of only two Oscar nominated actors (that we're aware of) that were raised Mormon. The other is Amy Adams. The Mormonism factoid is hilarious since Moore excelled at playing "fast" girls onscreen (see also Peyton Place) and lived a fairly tabloid friendly life, marrying six times and eventually posing for Playboy. Moore brought Natalie Wood's future husband RJ Wagner as her date (he was in one of the nominated films With a Song in My Heart).
• Terry Moore is now 92 and she is the only surviving Oscar nominee from this ceremony. (Her date that night, RJ Wagner, is also still with us. He's 91.)
• Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, which had won the Honorary for Best Foreign Language Film at the previous ceremony (before international feature was a category) was nominated for Art Direction at this ceremony. It was the first competitive category nomination for any Asian film. Foreign films showing up at two consecutive Oscar ceremonies happened several times but Oscar finally put an end to this in the 1970s with a rule that's still in place. If you are nominated for Best International Feature in your submission year, you are ineligible for other categories thereafter. This is why some foreign features with high Oscar hopes actually release during the calendar year of their submission (even though that's not required for the foreign film category) so that they can compete in other categories, too.
• This was also the night where John Ford won his fourth Best Directing Oscar (for The Quiet Man). No one else has or probably ever will match that record though William Wyler surely looked like he might at the time since he was still going strong and won his third for Ben-Hur (1959) seven years later. But Wyler never won again despite making a few more pictures that Oscar was into (The Collector, Funny Girl, The Children's Hour).
• And one final fun note. The Toulouse-Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge was up for several Oscars but won only Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction losing everything else including Best Picture. The same exact fate awaited the musical Moulin Rouge! (2001) 49 years later.
Reader Comments (26)
Marie Dressier was almost 64 when she won in1932, more than 10 years older than Shirley Booth was when she won hers.
Woops, Dressler won in 1931, which still made her around 63.
@Amy: I think Nathaniel was making a specific point about the drought of winning lead actresses in their 50s. (Jessica Tandy was 80 when she won hers.)
That's true, but, tellingly enough, the Academy members probably didn't know that they were honoring a 50-something actress. For a long time, Booth gave out her birth year as 1907 (shaving 9(!) years off her age) - that was my belief for a long time - so the Academy members thought they were awarding a 45-year old!
Shirley MacLaine came quite close to being a Best Actress winner in her 50s. The Terms of Endearment star picked up her Oscar on April 9, 1984. She celebrated her 50th birthday a mere 15 days later on April 24th.
Katharine Hepburn doesn't qualify either. When she won in 1968 and 1969, she seemed to be 58 and 59 years old because she was giving her birth year out as 1909, (a year still used on some web sites) when actually she was 2 1/2 years older having been born in 1907, thus about a month shy of 61 and 62 years old for her 60s wins.
I just loved Terry Moore when we watched Peyton Place for the Smackdown ... more than the actual nominees from her movie. Real magnetism. Has anyone seen any of her other films besides Come Back Little Sheba?
Glad to see Julianne and Renee join the "Best Actress in their 50s" club this past decade. Hoping that this trend continues.
The guy in the Oscar ceremony photo with Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille, Gloria Swanson and Bob Hope is Charles Brackett. He was president of the Screen Writers Guild (1938-1939), and served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1949 to 1955. He wrote or produced more than 40 films during his career, including Ninotchka (1939), The Major and The Minor(1942), To Each His Own(1946), The King and I(1956). From 1936-1950, Brackett worked with Billy Wilder as his collaborator on thirteen films, including The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), which won an Oscar for his screenplays. The duo's professional partnership ended in 1950, after the conclusion of Sunset B. Brackett then went to work at 20th Century-Fox as a screenwriter and producer. His script of Titanic (1953)earned him another Oscar. He received an honorary Oscar for his career in 1958.
James from Ames:
Terry Moore is a magnetic presence hard to forget. She has a rugged filmography with few films in which she has important roles and a lot of TV work. Her feature films I saw, besides Peyton Place and Come Back Little Sheba, were
✓Beneath the 12-Mile Reef(1953) a Romeo and Juliet (she and Robert Wagner) about fishermen with Oscar-nominated color cinematography and incredible underwater scenes.
✓Mighty Joe Young (1949), the first version of that film with Charlize Theron and the giant monkey with Terry Moore in Charlize's role. Very funny and a lot of action.
✓Bernardine (1957) Colorful but anemic musical in the style of Elvis Presley where she is the dream girl of Pat Boone, singer who was, as they used to say, a fever, at the time.
Gloria Swanson looks amazing in that picture, Mary Pickford looks positively matronly in comparison.
I have to say a word in defense of The Greatest Show on Earth. It absolutely didn't deserve to win Best Picture, or even be nominated honestly, but taking the prize factor out of it the film is a big, colorful silly fun entertainment with the sort of star-studded cast that Old Hollywood specialized in with some spectacular set pieces.
With his small role in With a Song in My Heart, Robert Wagner dead ringer of Chris Pine caught the attention of the audience who sent so many letters - there was still no Internet - to 20th-Century-Fox that its boss Darryl F. Zannuck began building up the actor for stardom.
BOOTH4EVA
Robert Wagner is one of the last surviving members of the principal cast of The Towering Inferno, my first movie obsession. So he will always have a special place in my heart.
I have a feeling this "distribution of wealth" might happen again this year. Imagine: best pic to Minari, director to Chloe Zhao, actress to Carey, actor to Chadwick, supporting to Daniel (ugh) and Maria or Glenn 👀
Well, no wonder I've always loved the Oscar. I was born the year they began broadcasting the ceremony. It was always a big night in our house when I was growing up. We would write out lists of who we wanted, or get the list from the newspaper and circle our favorites. I really started my life of being a big movie fan, by growing up in a household where movies were treasured.
Well, if you see the pattern this way, you may well live to see it once more: 2056, 2105, 2112...
I've always wanted to see this version of Moulin Rouge because the Best Picture nominees this year are so odd, maybe this one is the hidden prize? But it never seems to show up anywhere.
What a cool article! Thanks for this. I love the Oscar onstage on the giant cake. That's what it's supposed to be right?
What a great article!
It's interesting that this is the first televised year. We often talk about the broadcast now and the "draw" of big performers and popular films, but this is an odd year. Other than Cooper, while the winners aren't big stars, there were plenty of them among the nominees. And as poorly aged as this best picture winner is, it was the biggest film of the year and Paramount's biggest film ever. I have to imagine that helped it across the finish line.
Nathaniel, I know you’re a big fan of Natalie Wood, so I’m curious about your thoughts on Robert Wagner. Do you believe he’s shady or gets a bad rep?
@brookesboy. "Love. your choice of actor????
Love the Viola Davis shade. Half of her nominations are in the wrong category.
The eagerness with which so many on this site pile on Davis’ category fraud when plenty of others are guilty of the same makes me so uncomfortable. At least Nathaniel’s mention made sense in context.
I pretend Gloria Grahame won for "Sudden Fear". :)
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