1941 Oscar Watch

1941 is quite possibly the worst Oscar year and not just because Citizen Kane lost.  I don't like any of the winners in any category.  How Green Was My Valley is one of the most boring Best Picture winners ever.  Now, Citizen Kane lost mainly due to political reasons, which is totally cool.  If you don't want to vote for Citizen Kane because you're afraid of some tyrannical newspaper magnate that  the film is based on, then that's a legitimate reason not to vote for the film.  I'm not one of those people who bows down to Citizen Kane, I respect it a great deal but it's not a film I can watch no matter what mood I'm in.  The real slap in the face here is, with Citizen Kane out of the running they could have picked something fun like The Maltese Falcon or Here Comes Mr. Jordan or something really populist like Sergeant York.  Instead they went for the next classiest picture on the list which makes it seem like they really thought How Green Was My Valley was better than Citizen Kane.  It's like if Gone With The Wind lost to Wuthering Heights.  I can understand voting for the more fun movie over the arguably better made film but when the choice is between two artsy movies, you should probably pick the better artsy movie, right?
You can see my GABBY winners and nominees HERE

BEST PICTURE

10. The Little Foxes - I don't like movies like this.  Like if my buddy said we should watch The Little Foxes tonight I would question why we were friends and why he would ever suggest such a thing.  This movie really crystallized my thoughts about why I hate these types of movies though.  In the past I used to say it was because they were so wordy and focused more on the sets and costumes.  Watching The Little Foxes I realized that they are mostly about rich people, and I couldn't give a shit about rich people's problems.  This movie focuses a lot on money too, they're trying to figure out how to get money, if they were so broke, sell that old antique globe you got in your sitting room.  It's also filmed like a play most of the time.

Who has a conversation like this?  I'm surprised the dude on the left isn't cheating towards the camera.

9. One Foot In Heaven - I don't usually mention what didn't get nominated but with 10 nominees you would think either all 10 would be really good or there was nothing else to nominate.  This year you have Ball Of Fire, The Devil And Miss Jones, The Devil And Daniel Webster, Penny Serenade, The Lady Eve and Dumbo but the Academy picked One Foot In Heaven to fill out the Best Picture category, its only nomination.  This movie was really hard to track down and when that happens I either really like the movie or really dislike it.  This was the latter.  It's a very slow moving and episodic look at the life of a minister's family.  Frederic March is a minister and they move from parish to parish.  The dramatic moments are like a bad episode of a soap opera and the lighter moments are like when John Boy spills pie on his shirt on The Waltons and everybody laughs.

8. Blossoms In The Dust - This is a technicolor biopic about a lady who made it her life mission to place orphaned children with families.  On the plus side, this is one of the most colorful movies I have ever seen.  Watching this movie in the same week as The Little Foxes made it look really impressive.  One other good thing I can say about the movie, it's accidentally hilarious.  This movie is such a collection of biopic tropes that I started laughing at every other scene.  Garson plays Edna Gladney and she becomes an advocate for illegitimate children for several reasons.  She has a son, afterwards the doctor tells her that she can't have any more children, so of course the son dies.  That scene shouldn't be funny but the way it's staged is The Room level quality.  Also, her sister was adopted.  So when her sister is about to get married and her future mother-in-law finds out that her parents aren't her birth parents, all hell breaks loose and she kills herself from the shame.  I had no idea being adopted was like being a second class citizen back then.  Like, this lady couldn't help the fact that her parents abandoned her and old women are dropping their glasses when they hear she's adopted.  The movie is pretty terrible but at least it was more entertaining than The Little Foxes and One Foot In Heaven.

7. Suspicion - Some people seem to really like this movie but I think it may be my least favorite Hitchcock film.  It's well done for what it is but the story is just barely present.  It should be called Anticipation because the whole movie seems to be building to a climax that is a complete letdown.  Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train, they get married, after the wedding she slowly starts to discover that he's a bit of a cad.  He gambles, he's broke, he lies, he can't hold down a job, he expects to live off of her family's money.  Then she starts to suspect that he is going to murder her for the inheritance.  Turns out he wasn't.  They talk on a cliff and he explains that he hasn't been trying to murder her and she says, that's great.  We don't get any resolution on the fact that this guy is a degenerate gambler and pathological liar.  In fairness to Hitchcock, the studio mandated a happy ending because they didn't want audiences to associate Cary Grant with murder.  It's possible that a better ending would save the movie, but a failure is still a failure and because of the bad ending the movie makes no sense when you re-watch it.  Why is Joan Fontaine so scared?  Why does Cary Grant seem to be so sinister at times?  The whole things turns out to be a misunderstanding.

6. How Green Was My Valley - The only reason this looks like a Best Picture winner is because of the cinematography and John Ford's directorial eye for shots.  If you want an episodic look into the life of a family of coal miners then this is a good movie.  Otherwise, just what was the story here?  Things happen to this family and then the movie's over.  For the most part, none of the characters change, they just exist, and you're left thinking, wow, I guess being an Irish coal miner was a tough job.  It's also filled with really dull voice over narration that just makes it feel like a book report.  This movie is always going to be remembered as the film that beat Citizen Kane, which is unfair, because it's a boring and dull film no matter what.

5. Sergeant York - If you've seen Hacksaw Ridge then you've seen Sergeant York.  I was amazed at how the two movies are practically beat for beat the same, one being much bloodier and in color.  Alvin York is a poor Tennessee farmer who likes to drink more than anything else.  Right when his life hits rock bottom he wanders into a church and finds religion.  Then WWI breaks out and he is called up but killing is against the bible so he's conflicted.  He gets denied deferment and goes to boot camp where everyone drools over how well he can shoot a gun.  Now he has to rationalize whether he can kill people if it's against his religion.  Unlike in Hacksaw Ridge, this guy decides that killing is a sometimes okay thing.  This movie was a huge hit because as this movie was in theaters WWII broke out and it's an incredibly patriotic film.  It's kinda messed up when watched as a propaganda film because the message is basically, We know you don't want to kill people but you like America, right?  Well America trumps God, so go kill some people.  It is a really good movie though, unnecessarily long and kinda preachy, but good.

4. Hold Back The Dawn - This was the biggest surprise of the year for me.  Before I watched this I thought Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, romance, there is no way I'm gonna be in to this.  I got sucked into the story though and thought, that was cute but will probably be down near the bottom of the nominees.  Then I watched the other movies and Hold Back The Dawn kept moving farther and farther up the list.  Boyer is in Mexico trying to get a visa to move to the U.S..  He meets de Havilland who is a plain school teacher, woos her and marries her to get across the border.  He also has a jealous ex-lover played by Paulette Godard who spills the beans and he ends up falling in love within his sham marriage.  It's a really cute movie, not terrific, but cute, and it's written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.  It shouldn't be my #4 movie but I would rather watch it than over half the movies nominated this year.

3. Here Comes Mr. Jordan - What a fun movie.  After doing my 1978 Oscar Watch and being let down with Heaven Can Wait it was so nice to see this story done right.  This movie treats it like comedic fantasy where Beatty for some reason was trying to ground the story and seemed more concerned with looking good in his football uniform.  Joe Pendleton is a boxer who dies in a plane crash, actually he doesn't die, but an angel on his first day takes him to heaven anyway.  Once the mistake is found out it's too late because Joe's body has been cremated.  He now needs a new body so he jumps into the body of a millionaire who has just been murdered by his wife.  This has a lot of things in it that are better than either of the remakes and the movie's main weapon is Claude Rains.  He plays Mr. Jordan and is the highlight of the film commanding respect while also seeming to get some sort of perverse joy at the chaos surrounding him.

2. The Maltese Falcon - I feel like too much has been written about these last two movies so I'll spare a plot synopsis and just say that Humphrey Bogart plays detective Sam Spade in a film noir directed by John Huston.  It's a near perfect film and at just 101 minutes is the tightest film on this list.  Absolutely no filler is in the film.

1. Citizen Kane - It's the greatest movie of all time, right?  It's really easy to say that for many reasons but if this is your favorite movie then I question how you watch movies.  It is almost impossible to watch this movie for pure enjoyment.  Unless Jacob Tremblay from Room snuck into my VHS collection where I had put the wrong label on my copy of Citizen Kane and he thought he was watching the 1993 Super Bowl, you can't go into this movie with no expectations either.  When you're watching Citizen Kane you're watching the greatest film ever made.  You're not sitting down with a bucket of popcorn.  When I watch it I'm looking at a visual masterpiece.  The editing, cinematography, acting, lighting, storytelling techniques, symbolism, flashbacks, surprise ending, newsreel footage, you could teach someone how to make a movie by studying this movie, and people have done just that.  When you get to the story though, it's just a biopic.

I want to vote for The Maltese Falcon but I have to vote for Citizen Kane, and I'm okay with that.  This isn't an English Patient situation where I feel I have to reward an impressive effort even if the execution is lacking, Citizen Kane is a great movie.  It's just over rated, but that's not the fault of the film.  I gotta look at this historically.  No other movie looked like Citizen Kane in 1941 and it changed the way movies were made.  Watch One Foot In Heaven and then watch Citizen Kane and you will see what movies were and what they could be.  It may not be the best movie ever made, but it was the first great movie and it's a technical achievement that may never have been surpassed.

Now you can read all about the history of Citizen Kane, and you should if you're into movies, but there was no way it could win in 1941.  William Randolph Hearst did everything he could to destroy the film and succeeded.  It wasn't a hit, it didn't get the reviews you would think it got, and it was booed when it was announced at the Academy Awards.  In hindsight it seems ludicrous that it didn't win but at the time it made perfect sense.  Imagine if they made a scathing biopic about Rupert Murdoch, Fox News would condemn it so hard that half the country would hate the movie without seeing it.  You can't win Oscars if your movie is too divisive.  So with Kane out of the equation I really wish they had gone with The Maltese Falcon.  How Green Was My Valley may have been the worst choice.  Sergeant York would have made perfect sense as a winner, Here Comes Mr. Jordan would be a weird winner but fun, even if Suspicion won that would give another win to a Hitchcock film and even if Blossoms In The Dust won that would be an insane story that a movie that terrible beat Citizen Kane.  How it is now the most boring film won, John Ford won another Oscar so it's not even a win for someone who was deserved.  They had the greatest movie of all time in their nominees and they picked the dumbest choice.  I guess The Little Foxes would be a worst winner but it's still a terrible decision.

Oscar Winner: How Green Was My Valley
My Vote: Citizen Kane
GABBY Winner: Citizen Kane

BEST ACTOR

 

5. Robert Montgomery - Here Comes Mr. Jordan - Obviously you can't really compare his performance to Warren Beatty or Chris Rock because his came first.  But when you do compare them, his is the best.  Montgomery really nails the fish out of water aspect of the film.  When Beatty jumps into the millionaire's body he is singularly focused on his goal of winning the Super Bowl.  Montgomery is really confused by everything that's going on and only really makes the decision when he sees an injustice going on.  Montgomery also seems to know that he's in a comedy and tries to illicit laughs rather than bored looks.  Sorry, I just really didn't like Heaven Can Wait.  It's incredible that the same story can have so much charm in one version and lack all charm in another.  Most of the credit for the difference is because of Montgomery.

4. Cary Grant - Penny Serenade - I'm kinda surprised they nominated Grant for this and not Suspicion, which got a Best Picture nomination.  In that film I thought he nailed the character of a carefree playboy you're never quite sure you can trust.  I liked this film better though so I'm happy they went this way.  Penny Serenade is a romantic drama starring Grant and Irene Dunne.  It's told in flashback and centered around the songs they were listening to at the time.  It's a very sad film but also a very beautiful film and makes me cry every time I watch it.  It follows their relationships through good times and bad, be forewarned, they have some bad times.  Cary Grant was always Cary Grant and he was perfect at playing Cary Grant characters.  This was 1 of only 2 nominations in his career so I'm compelled to vote for him just because he is one of my favorite movie stars.  Problme is that this movie is about two people equally.  Grant is incredibly heartfelt but I could only vote for him if Irene Dunne was also nominated and won.

3. Gary Cooper - Sergeant York - I always found Cooper a pretty dull screen presence.  He seems to just stare off into space while people act around him.  He's perfectly cast here though, he excelled at playing slow southern men.  Alvin York is an uneducated hick who likes to drink a lot until one day he finds religion.  Then he gets drafted into World War I and has to weigh his religious beliefs against his patriotic duties.  Cooper's best moments are when he doesn't talk.  There's a scene where York is reading both the bible and the history of America together and seems genuinely confused about what to do, which is probably because Cooper himself was confused in real life.

2. Orson Welles - Citizen Kane - Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, newspaper man, orphan, consummate over achiever.  If there is one flaw with Citizen Kane it is the old age makeup which looks very theatrical and unrealistic but Welles does a good job with playing his character through several decades of his life by changing his physicality, which almost makes the makeup superfluous.  It's a tremendous performance but I know I'm going to vote for Welles in 2 other categories.  If I was going to rank his contributions to the film it would be as a director first, writer second, actor third.  Unless you want to give him 3 Oscars, this is the best category to not vote for Citizen Kane and spread the wealth.

1. Walter Huston - The Devil And Daniel Webster - Well first off, Huston isn't really the lead in The Devil And Daniel Webster, neither is Daniel Webster.  The story focuses almost entirely on Jabez Stone, a poor farmer who sells his soul for prosperity and then tries to get out of the deal when the devil comes to collect.  Huston plays Mr. Scratch, aka The Devil, and he's such a huge presence and he delivers such a fun performance that he feels like he's in every scene but that's only because the scenes without him lack as much energy.  Huston disappears for a good chunk of the film and then comes back to collect what has been owed to him.  Normally I would use the size of his role as an excuse not to vote for him but he's so good in the film that I have to consider him.

So Montgomery is the weak link here, which makes it a pretty solid top 5 because he'd be a #2 or #3 in a weaker year.  I'll take off Grant because while he should have won an Oscar in his career this isn't the performance he deserved it the most for, neither is his other nominated role but we'll get to that in 1944.  The vote is between Cooper, Welles and Huston.  Cooper makes the most sense because Sergeant York was the biggest hit of the year, Huston is more of a supporting part and he's going to win in a few years and Welles couldn't win anyway because of politics.  I also like the Cooper win here because if they don't give it to him this year he probably wins next year and that takes an Oscar away from James Cagney.  Or, if he doesn't win this year or next year then his win for High Noon makes perfect sense.  Point is, this guy didn't need 2 Oscars.  He was an incredibly limited actor and downright boring in most roles.  In all honesty, I would probably vote Cary Grant over Gary Cooper in hindsight because of Cooper's 1952 win.  I'm voting Huston because it's the performance I liked the best.

Oscar Winner: Gary Cooper

My Vote: Walter Huston
GABBY Winner: Charles Coburn for The Devil And Miss Jones

BEST ACTRESS

 

5. Bette Davis - The Little Foxes - Bette Davis had 2 Oscars already and there's no way she should win a 3rd for a movie like The Little Foxes.

4. Greer Garson - Blossoms In The Dust - Garson is perfectly fine as Edna Gladney, a woman who made it her life mission to find homes for orphans.  The movie is a straight up biopic and doesn't give anyone much of anything to do other than run through the checklist of this woman's life but Garson is perfectly serviceable in the role, there's just not much to get excited about.  Her red hair looks really good in the technicolor though.

3. Joan Fontaine - Suspicion - So this is a movie I don't like that much.  Fontaine plays a woman who finds out that the man she impulsively marries may not be what he advertised himself to be.  She then begins to suspect that he might be intending to murder her.  Her suspicions start to control her life until he says that he isn't trying to murder her and they hug.  I suppose she's fine but there's not much to her character other than getting startled every now and then.

2. Olivia de Havilland - Hold Back The Dawn - This is a perfect Olivia de Havilland character.  She specialized in playing plain women and even though she was a beautiful Hollywood actress you could always believe her as a woman who doesn't realize how beautiful she is.  In Hold Back The Dawn she's a teacher who gets easily wooed by a Romanian gigolo.  She agrees to marriage and then finds out that he is only interested in her so he can get into America.  It's a tragic character with a heart because the gigolo ends up falling for her.  She is really terrific in the role and, even though she's going to end up winning 2 Oscars, deserved a win before her sister.

1. Barbara Stanwyck - Ball Of Fire - I love this movie.  Gary Cooper is an English professor writing an encyclopedia with a bunch of other professors.  They know everything about everything but are clueless about social interactions.  When they hear some young kids talking in hip slang, Cooper takes it upon himself to learn the current vernacular.  He walks into a nightclub and meets Sugarpuss O'Shea, played by Stanwyck.  She is so cool, sexy and confidant and knows all about boogie and yum yum.  She also has a gangster boyfriend and when trouble hits she decides to hide out with the bookworms.  She is so much fun teaching a bunch of nerds how to be hip and she is the exact right woman that a nerd would fall in love with.

Davis and Garson are out right off the bat and, honestly, so is Fontaine.  She doesn't really do much of anything in Suspicion other than look all shifty eyed at Cary Grant.  I can only think that this was a consolation prize for not winning for Rebecca.  So my vote is between de Havilland and Stanwyck and since Olivia is going to win twice in her career I gotta pick Stanwyck.  I would pick Stanwyck anyway because she was my favorite, not to mention this same year she starred in 2 other great comedies, The Lady Eve and Meet John Doe.

Oscar Winner: Joan Fontaine
My Vote: Barbara Stanwyck
GABBY Winner: Barbara Stanwyck

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

 

5. Walter Brennan - Sergeant York - Obviously Walter Brennan can't win here.  Not only did he just win last year, he won 3 of the first 5 Best Supporting Actor Oscars.  4 out of 6 would be a little overkill.  It's not like that was an accident though.  The guy was quite possibly the Best Supporting Actor who ever lived.  He always created interesting characters and stole the show.  The first hour of Sergeant York is not incredibly exciting but every scene with Brennan as the town preacher and grocer is captivating.  If he hadn't have won 3 times already he would be in 3rd place just based on the performance.  The dude was also in 5 movies this year which is just insane.

4. Donald Crisp - How Green Was My Valley - Crisp won the Oscar this year for playing the patriarch of a poor Irish coal mining family.  Honestly, I should probably have him ranked 5th because I would rather Walter Brennan win a 4th Oscar for an interesting performance than this guy win for just basically existing.  He's appropriately stoic in the role but doesn't do much of anything in the film.

3. James Gleason - Here Comes Mr. Jordan - If anyone was going to get nominated from Here Comes Mr. Jordan it probably should have been Claude Rains.  This would have been a good opportunity for him to win too.  But they instead nominated James Gleason who plays Max Corkle.  Max is Joe Pendleton's manager, when Joe dies in a plane crash and inhabits a new body Corkle is the only living person who knows what's going on.  He has some nice moments when he's trying to communicate with invisible people and is pretty heartbreaking when he realizes that he will never see his friend again.  I kept thinking that this part could be more fun if it was played for comedy.  Gleason is playing the part more like the straight man that crazy things happen to, which works for the film but I kept wanting to see Lou Costello seeing ghosts.

2. Charles Coburn - The Devil And Miss Jones - Coburn is probably my favorite performance on this list but I can't vote for him because he is unquestionably the lead of the movie.  This isn't a case, like Walter Huston this year, where he could be considered supporting or lead.  This guy is in practically every scene.  The movie is about a business owner who goes undercover as a shoe salesman at his company to root out union troublemakers.  He comes to find that their complaints are all legitimate, it's your basic Ebeneezer Scrooge story done as a romantic comedy.  Coburn plays the business man and is hilarious.  He's a clueless millionaire who thinks he knows everything but when he actually gets to the sales floor he knows nothing about anything but still has his pompous attitude.

1. Sydney Greenstreet - The Maltese Falcon - Greenstreet plays Caspar Gutman and most of the heavy lifting is done by his impressive physique.  John Huston shoots Greenstreet from low angles to accentuate his girth, which makes the character all the more interesting, before he's introduced he is referenced as "The Fat Man" so the guy better be fat when you see him.  Greenstreet basically acts as the exposition in the film, he explains the falcon and comes back to explain that he was going to frame other people to get it.  He's really only in 3 scenes which makes him the best "supporting" role on this list.

So Charles Coburn is my favorite performance on the list but I can't vote for him.  It would be like if James Dean got nominated in the supporting category for Rebel Without A Cause, isn't he the rebel?  Well Charles Coburn is The Devil in The Devil And Miss Jones but I guess since he was a character actor they stuck him here.  If only Coburn and Walter Huston had swapped categories I would vote Coburn for lead and Huston for supporting and not give it a second thought.  So with Coburn out I gotta vote for Sydney Greenstreet.  However, looking at this historically, if Charles Coburn wins here then he doesn't win next year and maybe Claude Rains wins for Casablanca like he should have.  I think we can all agree that Donald Crisp winning means absolutely nothing.

Oscar Winner: Donald Crisp
My Vote: Sydney Greenstreet
GABBY Winner: Walter Huston for The Devil And Daniel Webster

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

5. Teresa Wright - The Little Foxes - I'm not going to vote for The Little Foxes for anything so Teresa Wright was a beautiful and talented actress but, seriously, to hell with this movie.  Wright's going to win next year anywhere so let's move on.

4. Patricia Collinge - The Little Foxes - Again, I hated this movie.  She's fine in it but let's move on.

3. Sara Allgood - How Green Was My Valley - Sara Allgood plays an old Irish mother and, how do I put this delicately?, she's not that good.  She reminds me of my mother, not in that way where it's like wholesome memories of my childhood, in that way when I would make short films and have my mom try to act in them.  My mom is a great lady but not an actress and that's what Allgood reminded me of.  She seems like a lady trying to act rather an actor inhabiting a character.  She's not distracting bad but she's not all that good either.  I didn't mean that to be a pun, that was purely accidental.

2. Margaret Wycherly - Sergeant York - Wycherly plays Alvin York's mother and she does surprisingly little in this film to have earned an Academy Award nomination.  She's fine in the film, she's just not in that much.  She does give the movie a moral center though, she's the good that our boys are fighting for overseas.  She has a few nice moments but her part is kind of forgettable and is basically just a generic "Ma" role.

1. Mary Astor - The Great Lie - Astor plays Brigid O'Shaugnessy, originally introduced as Ruth Wonderly, she's the mysterious femme fatale that hires Sam Spade to find her sister and sets the plot in motion...oh, wait, that's Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon.  I don't know why they chose to nominate her for The Great Lie instead where she plays a pianist who gives her baby to Bette Davis.  Basically, Davis is married, her husband dies in a plane crash, Astor is the guy's ex who shows up with a baby she had with him, Davis decides to raise the baby as her own, turns out the husband isn't dead and Astor comes back wanting both the baby and the man back.  It's not a great film, not a bad one, definitely not as good as The Maltese Falcon.

Oh boy do I hate this category.  I'm only voting for Mary Astor because she was in a different movie this same year that I liked.  I'm not voting for The Little Foxes, or Allgood, Wycherly would only get my vote because of White Heat.  Of the actresses nominated Astor is the one I want to have an Oscar the most so I vote for her even though it's for the wrong film.

Oscar Winner: Mary Astor
My Vote: Mary Astor
GABBY Winner: Mary Astor for The Maltese Falcon

Best Director

John Ford wins for How Green Was My Valley.  Now, no doubt that Orson Welles deserved this.  Citizen Kane is a visual masterpiece and the story, no matter how cliche it is, flows so well because Welles produced such a focused film.  At first I thought, ok, so Welles isn't going to win this for political reasons so they gave an Oscar to John Ford, he deserved it for a good career and he directed The Grapes Of Wrath last year and that lost.  Then I looked back and found that while The Grapes Of Wrath lost Best Picture, Ford won Best Director, this was his 3rd Oscar.  Unfortunately, if you take out Orson Welles there really isn't anyone to vote for.  William Wyler got nominated for The Little Foxes, which I have already documented my dislike for, Alexander Hall got nominated for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which would have been a fun choice but weird historically, imagine if that was the film that beat Citizen Kane.  That leaves Howard Hawks who was not only a great director with an impressive resume but he made the top grossing film of the year with Sergeant York.  So obviously I vote for Welles but if we absolutely can't give him the Oscar they should have gone with Hawks.

Best Original Screenplay/Screenplay/Original Story
Citizen Kane takes home its only Oscar here, and while the screenplay is good it's not the most revolutionary thing about the film.  I'll talk more about that injustice when we get to the technical categories.  Here Comes Mr. Jordan wins both Screenplay and Original Story.  Ok, I think I have this figured out now.  'Original Screenplay' is for a script written directly for the screen.  'Screenplay' seems to mean based on previously released material, as all the nominees are adaptations.  'Original Story' can either mean original screenplay or, in the case of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the material the screenplay was based on because the guy that wrote the play Heaven Can Wait that inspired the movie won an Oscar.  He won an Oscar because he wrote the play.  What?  Is William Shakespeare eligible for an Oscar when they adapt Hamlet?  Oscar, your writing categories made no sense in these days.

Best Documentary
I don't usually comment on this category because I haven't seem many documentaries from the 40s but this is the first year this category existed so I thought I should notate that Churchill's Island wins the inaugural Best Documentary prize against a lot of other war based documentaries and something called Life Of A Thoroughbred that sound absolutely fascinating.

Best Music Score Of A Dramatic Picture/Scoring Of A Musical Picture
The Devil And Daniel Webster wins for its score.  So often with movies from this time period I fail to notice the music when I'm watching them because there's music over everything so it just kind of washes over me.  The great Bernard Herrmann scored this one and watching it again, with an intent on listening to the music, it really is a wonderful score.  I'm kind of surprised that Dumbo won Best Scoring Of A Musical Picture, not because it's not deserved but it just doesn't seem like something the Academy would do.  My surprise is probably because they haven't made many good decisions this year so at least the music branch knew what was up.

Best Song
I decided to listen to every nominated song this year because I have only seen 3 of the nominated films.  The winner was 'The Last Time I Saw Paris' from Lady Be Good.  It's a standard ballad from the 1940s that is sung very nicely in the film.  Of the other nominated tunes my favorite was Blues In The Night from the film of the same name.  I had never heard of the film before but I'm sure you've heard the song in some capacity, it starts out with "My mama done told me...".  I have no idea what the movie is about but the song is classic.  I also liked Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B from Buck Privates and Chatanooga Choo Choo from Sun Valley Serenade which were both fun and, of course, Baby Mine from Dumbo which is such an iconic and sweet scene.  The rest were standard 1940s fare that reminded me of the slow parts in a Marx Brothers film.

Best Sound Recording
That Hamilton Woman wins for some reason.  I saw the movie years ago on TCM but don't remember the sound being particularly impressive.  You would think the gunfire in Sergeant York would have caught the Academy's attention.

Best Art Direction Black And White/Color
OK, here's where we start getting ridiculous.  How Green Was My Valley wins in the black and white category which makes sense until you remember that Citizen Kane has some of the most intricately and beautifully designed sets of all time.  Blossoms In The Dust wins in the color category which I suppose makes sense, I don't really remember the sets but everything looked really pretty in that movie.

Best Cinematography Black And White/Color
No matter what your opinions of Citizen Kane, you can't tell me that How Green Was My Valley had better cinematography.  This is the category I take the most offense with.  I don't really care that it lost Best Picture and Director, because in a way it's almost cooler to lose than to win, but when a movie this technically inventive gets ignored for, what were almost assuredly purely political reasons, that's kinda messed up.  Blood And Sand wins in the color category, and along with Blossoms In The Dust, there is just something alluringly gorgeous about a 1940s technicolor film.  I wonder if the technology still exists somewhere in a factory to make a movie look like this.  I'm surprised Scorsese or Tarantino haven't done a movie in this style.

Best Film Editing
Sergeant York wins, and if you're going to slight Citizen Kane, which should have won, then this was the second best choice.  The war scenes in the second half were really well done.

Best Special Effects
The special effects in I Wanted Wings don't look that impressive today but for the time they are really well done.  The movie uses a nice mixture of stock footage and models for the flying sequences that holds up and is pretty seamless.  They could have gone with something more special effects heavy like The Invisible Woman or Topper Returns but this was a nice choice.

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