My Oscar Completism Project: An Introduction
Saturday, April 19, 2025 at 10:00PM 
Sadly, my Best Actress journey may never be complete as THE BARKER, starring Betty Compson, only exists in the UCLA archive.
Are you an Oscar completist? I'm trying to be, having already seen all the winners in the big five categories and making my way through the rest. However, this year, I'll focus more on the acting races and the nominees that didn't get the gold. After talking with some friends, I realized I'm only 133 films away from having watched every performance ever nominated for an acting Academy Award, from 1928 to 2024. So, that shall be my challenge until December 31st, to check those titles and, hopefully, share my journey with you. This won't be a regularly scheduled series but something more erratic, bound to unravel in fits and starts, free-wheeling to the very end. What matters is that deadline and writing about everything I see until then. To start things off, I decided to take a sample of each category…
Gloria Swanson in THE TRESPASSER (1929)
Nominated for Best Actress at the 3rd Academy Awards
Lost to Norma Shearer in THE DIVORCEE
Though there's much to love about Pre-Code cinema, the introduction of synchronized sound to Hollywood filmmaking was something of a dark period. Innovation and formal risk-taking that had become commonplace in the later years of the silents seemed to recede as many artists struggled to adapt. Not everyone faced the same difficulties, and some cineastes found their footing right away – Arzner, Lubitsch, Mamoulian, Milestone, etc. Many did not. Looking at The Trespasser, shot and released as both a silent and a talkie, I can't say Edmund Goulding figured things out immediately. The 1929 movie, complete with occasional title cards and singing scenes meant to showcase the new technology, certainly pales in comparison to Grand Hotel or Blondie of the Follies, released just three years later. And let's not even talk about the crown jewel of the director's career – 1947's Nightmare Alley.
It's your basic "fallen woman" melodrama of this vintage, the kind of picture that was the bread and butter of one Joan Crawford for the first half of the 1930s. Indeed, looking at the role of a stenographer turned unwed mother turned kept woman turned self-sacrificing heroine, I'm surprised not to see the likes of Crawford or Hopkins in the lead. Then again, the movie is better for it, as Gloria Swanson brings a different energy to the proceedings, complicating many of the narrative clichés Goulding throws her along the way.
In her first talkie, Swanson proves she's much unlike Norma Desmond, adapting to the demands of synchronized sound and a dialogue-forward dramaturgy like a fish to water. Moreover, she does it without losing the tonal flexibility and physical expression honed over fifteen years in the movie business. Early on, she peppers comedy through our introduction to the story's characters and stakes, never playing the part in anticipation of her downfall. And when the first of many shoes drops, Swanson doesn't play up the despair of a woman whose wealthy paramour won't propose. Instead, she foregrounds pride and anger, outrage that beckons awe rather than pity. Near the end, though she might be unable to redeem every perfunctory plot beat, Swanson laces selflessness with a paradoxical hint of selfishness. Trust me, it makes sense when you're seeing it.
Truth be told, some incoherent silent movie technique intrudes upon Swanson's performance, though this rarely has outright adverse results. For example, she pantomimes shame so hard as to push the soap opera story into horror movie territory, a deathbed scene curdled and made grotesque. Working such unimaginative material, these choices provide an edge I can't imagine would've registered without Swanson commanding the camera. More a movie goddess than a movie star, the thespian sharpens every angle the character possesses and invents a couple more for good measure.
11 Best Actress nominees left…
Paul Muni in BLACK FURY (1935)
(not) Nominated for Best Actor at the 8th Academy Awards
Lost to Victor McLaglen in THE INFORMANT
Many political-minded movies that Hollywood produced during the Great Depression are littered with muddled ideas, often finding themselves stuck into pits of contradiction. Black Fury, the story of a Pennsylvania coal miner caught between the workers' union and the management's interests during a strike, doesn't differ from that rule. Indeed, the script is something of a disaster, and the cast does nothing to help, a good number of the actors stumbling on exaggerated regional accents that render almost every character into a caricature. Thankfully, Michael Curtiz directs the hell out of the picture, especially the scenes set in the subterranean hell of the mine. Courting exploitation cinema, he shows the poor conditions and dark recesses through ink-black shadows and angular reflections over rock. Genre fare characterizes much of the director's best work from this period, but Black Fury proves his gifts could survive a stodgier text just fine.
If only somebody else had been cast in the lead. As it happens, Paul Muni sinks whatever hope there might have been of this labor melodrama surviving Abem Finkel and Carl Erickson's script. Never one to turn down an opportunity to ham it up and predicate his performance on the most disruptive mannerisms available, the future Oscar winner sinks his teeth into a pseudo-Slavic cadence. If that were all, the characterization could be salvaged, but Muni doesn't stop there. Oh no, he surrenders to every one of his worst impulses, mugging the house down in a way that implies obvious theatrical technique and none of the lucidity to deploy it with restraint. What hurts the movie most is how critical he is to the narrative and how much the actor's approach suggests a condescending attitude towards the man he's playing. In a film that should dignify its characters, Muni seems to be mocking them in the guise of patrician sympathy.
No wonder the Academy of 1935 loved him. Or did they? As it happens, Paul Muni wasn't an official nominee, only attaining that status after he came second in the winners' vote. Because of the Bette Davis scandal that befell the Oscars when she was snubbed for Of Human Bondage, write-in votes were allowed, and, in retrospect, AMPAS is eager to count these honors as official nods. Go to their website, and Muni is among the 8th Academy Award nominees. I confess I decided to watch Black Fury to cross this one out of the list early on this Oscar journey. But if you're a fan of his, don't worry – there's more Muni in the future without these qualifiers to consider.
63 Best Actor nominees left…
Aline MacMahon in DRAGON SEED (1944)
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 17th Academy Awards
Lost to Ethel Barrymore in NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART
The best thing I can say about Dragon Seed is that it made me reappreciate the merits of The Good Earth. Next to this wartime propaganda, the 1937 Best Actress champion looks downright masterful and even Luise Rainer's yellowface act feels underappreciated. That's how awful the Harold S. Bucquet and Jack Conway movie is - deeply racist in its casting decisions and dialogue writing, even more so in delivery, but also exceedingly boring. At 145 minutes, it moves at a snail's pace, inflated with a sanctimonious sense of wartime duty that makes everything seem slower still. The interior sets and Sidney Wagner's lensing add some luster to the thing, but the production value is as inconsistent as the degrees of race-bending cosmetics on display. A terrifying Agnes Moorehead looks like she time-traveled from the Cloud Atlas shoot, while Henry Travers wears glasses, some facial hair, and nothing else. What?
One almost wonders if Aline MacMahon got her Best Supporting Actress nomination because she looks positively human in direct comparison to the clowns she shares the screen with, including a sleep-walking Walter Huston as her husband and a career-worst Katharine Hepburn as the woman's daughter-in-law. You see, without the simple dignity of a given name, MacMahon's character should be the most cloying version of the submissive Asian wife stereotype midcentury America was so fond of, self-effaced to the point of non-entity. And yet, she's better than that, underplaying the sentimentality, delivering watery lines with an arid disaffection, cutting through the nonsense as best she can. Is that enough to rise above the catastrophe? Not really, though I won't go as far as calling this nomination worthy. Still, I'm glad she was present, as I can scarcely imagine sitting through Dragon Seed without her there. That hypothetical ordeal might have killed this entire project before it started.
15 Best Supporting Actress nominees left…
John Huston in THE CARDINAL (1963)
Nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 36th Academy Awards
Lost to Melvyn Douglas in HUD
Otto Preminger's The Cardinal is more interesting to ponder than to watch, its conflicting ideas a deep well of fascination that far exceeds whatever the director manages to put on screen. That's not to say his work is lackluster. Indeed, I've seen films that never achieve the austere splendor of The Cardinal's opening credits, when the many steps of Rome and the Vatican City serve to reconsider the smallness of men before the temples they build in honor of the divine and themselves. Within these geometries, notions of order come to mind, feeling antithetic to Men's movement within these spaces, these rituals, these high ideals. Such tensions percolate through the three-hour-plus runtime without ever resolving one way or another. Because, though stately, there's a volatile edge to The Cardinal, a storm brewing below the surface of prestige the infamously tetchy Preminger has orchestrated for a sort of Cinemascope anti-spectacle that's both overlong and rushed but never thoughtless.
In some ways, The Cardinal's most remarkable qualities and destabilizing faults are embodied in its leading man, Tom Tryon. Though not an actor of great range, he had the right look for the titular role, a mix of iconographic severity with a good bit of hunky all-American handsomeness. He is the matinée idol and the self-denial that would make that glamorous idea impossible, the appearance of warmth in direct clash with inhuman holiness that turns good spiritual values into the breeding ground for cruelty. The tension of a closeted queer performer under the attack of a bullying director only adds to the picture's strange alchemical properties. Watching him within Catholic rite and religious theater, it's almost hard to breathe freely. He is hypocrisy manifest, piety and valor as gold surfaces that have tarnished into something that’s upsetting to look upon but still beautiful, still suggestive of some higher purpose. If anything, his wooden delivery is the perfect perversity to complement Preminger’s ambivalent view of Catholicism. So, it may not be a great performance, but it's a magnificent feat of casting that reshapes The Cardinal around itself.
That said, Tyron was not the cast member to earn the only acting honor of the movie's six Academy Award nominations. Instead, it was John Huston, the most successful nepo baby in Hollywood's history and one of its better auteurs moonlighting as a thespian. He plays the protagonist's erstwhile superior, archbishop Glennon, who considers his newly ordained priest with caution, a censorious gaze permeating their first interactions. Fearful of the younger man's ambition, Huston foregrounds the ease with which the archbishop takes control, squashing what he sees as unearned self-importance. It's all about exuding power without breaking a sweat. The effortlessness is the point, as is the suggestion of the archbishop's pleasure in his own authority. If the performance were only that, Huston's nomination would be inexplicable, but he gets to illuminate a softer side as the clergyman comforts a dying colleague. Later, after Glennon starts to admire the protagonist, putting his hopes on him, he's pretty sensational at articulating the archbishop's disappointment. Although unsurprising, it's a solid turn.
49 Best Supporting Actor nominees left…
You can find the list of pictures I've left to see HERE. Any recommendations on what to watch next?
Reader Comments (2)
Midnight Express, Diary of a Mad Housewife and Awakenings are among my favorites on the list. Curious to hear what you'll think of the first two - doubt you'll like the third.
You are a lucky man. You have real treats ahead of you.
Robert De Niro is brilliant in Bang the Drum Slowly, though it was another cast member who was nominated for the Oscar.
Barbara Harris is terrific in the single, undisputed worst movie ever nominated for an Oscar, Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (As a fellow completist, no one will ever know if you zip through and just watch her. Really. The movie is that bad.)
Rod Steiger should have won the Best Actor Oscar for The Pawnbroker. Lee Marvin's victory for Cat Ballou is silly. Steiger’s win for In the Heat of the Night was yet another Oscar mea culpa moment.
Singer Bobby Darin is inexplicably stunning in Captain Newman, MD.
I also admire Duvall and O’Keefe in The Great Santini, Peter Fonda in Ulee’s Gold, John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, River Phoenix in Running on Empty, and Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver.
On a final note, my affection for Diane Keaton and the overwhelming intensity of the conclusion of Looking for Mr. Goodbar has never allowed me to watch the film again since I first saw in its initial release in 1977.
I am certainly looking forward to this series!