Comment Party: Best Actress, 1930s

Who is your favourite from each year in the 1930s? My current votes go like so though there are always more films to see so one must always reserve the right to change one's mind.

• 1930 Norma Shearer, The Divorcee
• 1931 Marie Dressler, Min & Bill
• 1932 Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus
• 1933 Greta Garbo, Queen Christina
• 1934 Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night
• 1935 Katharine Hepburn, Alice Adams
• 1936 Carole Lombard, My Man Godfrey
• 1937 Irene Dunne, The Awful Truth
• 1938 Bette Davis, Jezebel
• 1939 Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind (though I'll admit to being somewhat torn because Dark Victory is my favourite pre 1950s Bette Davis performance)

Did Katharine Hepburn deserve four Oscars?

By Cláudio Alves...

Before we wrap up our coverage of 1981, we must talk about the Oscar record that was established that season and has never been broken since.

By winning the Best Actress trophy for On Golden Pond, Katharine Hepburn became the most awarded actor in Academy Awards history, with four victories. That's not the only factor that makes her awards run so interesting. Famously, she was part of the only Best Actress tie when she and Barbra Streisand both won in 1968. Then, there's the fact that her first win came from the biggest Oscar eligibility period ever (17 months, 1932-33) and that the gap between her first win and her last is the longest for any actor (48 years). All this and she was never present to accept her little golden men. Whether you love her or not, this Old Hollywood star was truly one of a kind...

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Oscar's ridiculous accents

by Cláudio Alves

The Academy loves transformative performances, ones where an actor's chameleonic abilities are on full display. While the recent avalanche of biopics winning acting Oscars may suggest such dynamics are a recent phenomenon, it isn't so. Since the 20s, we've seen it happen regularly. Just look at Warner Baxter who won the second-ever Best Actor Oscar for putting on brown face and playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona. That particular example also brings up another favorite bit of acting work that the Academy seems to adore beyond reason – accents. Bad ones at that.

Some performers, like Meryl Streep, are brilliant at mimicking regional and personal accents, doing them so naturally that one forgets the artifice. Many others, can't be helped and often fail at the task. To be perfectly frank, I'm not a person that's much annoyed by bad accents onscreen. Nicole Kidman's American accent in The Portrait of a Lady is quite unconvincing, for instance, but I still consider it one of the actress' best works. That said, sometimes there are levels of incompetence too flagrant to ignore.

Such is the case of some Oscar champions, including a Best Actor winner whose efforts are cringe-worthy… 

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Almost There: Bette Davis in "Of Human Bondage"

by Cláudio Alves

Nowadays, Oscar snubs generate justifiable fire on social media and occassionally even get primetime attention. However, they're not huge stories that threaten the existence and validity of the Academy itself. It wasn't always like this. Back in the early days of the Oscars, some snubs were so outrageous they made fear blossom in the hearts of Academy members, threatening to invalidate the entire (new) institution in the eyes of the general public. So much so, that new rules were put in place to avoid similar outcomes, write-in votes were allowed and apologies were handed out in the shape of what we now call a career Oscar.

Such was the case in the mid-30s when Bette Davis made Of Human Bondage, defied Hollywood's expectations, became a sudden star and still failed to get the Academy Award nomination most thought she deserved…

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39 Days til Oscar

With just 39 days to go until Hollywood's High Holy Night, let's look back on "Hollywood's Greatest Year" and tell us who had your vote and heart in the historic 1939 Oscar races? My votes are the choice of image ;). The ★ means they won the Oscar. 

BEST PICTURE

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