Best Actress and the end of the Great Depression: An Alternative Oscar History
Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 7:00PM 
Miriam Hopkins in BECKY SHARP (1935), Janet Gaynor in A STAR IS BORN (1937), and Vivien Leigh in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) were the first 3 Best Actress nominees from full-color movies.
The woes of the Great Depression demanded escapism from Hollywood. Such spectacle came in a myriad of forms, including some technical advancements.
By 1935, the three-strip Technicolor process was ready for features, blessing the silver screen with hues that called themselves natural while shining bright like something out of a dream. New genres came into being, too, sometimes as an echo of the dark times – think gangster pictures and their basis in social realism turned pulp or the rise of horror at Universal – and sometimes as an antidote. The screwball comedy was a child of the Great Depression, alright, with some of its greatest hits holding a blissfully distorted mirror to off-screen miseries, distracting from them and offering some magical impossibility as succor for the soul. In other areas, movies kept getting bigger, upping the ante in ways that recalled the great epics of silent cinema, those endeavors that moved armies and mountains for the camera’s gaze and the audience’s pleasure.
Obviously, this all reverberated through the Oscars, including and especially the Best Actress race. But will my personal ballots reflect it in the same fashion? Well…
