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Well, movie fans, we’re a little more than one month away from the 97th annual Academy Awards. Over nearly a century, Tinseltown’s original night of self-congratulatory celebration has evolved from a dinner for about 270 people at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to today’s glitzy, globally televised spectacle from L.A.’s Dolby Theatre. And during those 97 years, controversies have raged continually over which pictures and performances should and shouldn’t have received the little golden man or even been nominated.
As mentioned above, the 1929 debut Academy presentation was–for 1920s Hollywood, anyway–a relatively modest affair. The winners had already been announced three months earlier (so much for the element of surprise). And as host Douglas Fairbanks announced each name, the evening took on the tone of a high school awards dinner. There were only 12 categories, including–for the first and only time–best title card writing (this was the tail end of the silent era, after all). What’s more, the nominees for Outstanding Picture of 1927-28 totaled three: the Paris-set romance 7th Heaven; The Racket, an early gangster thriller; and the eventual winner, the WWI actioner Wings. That year only, there was also an award dubbed Best Unique and Artistic Picture, meant to recognize what we now call “arthouse films.” F.W. Murnau’s first U.S. feature, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, took home the trophy over the documentary Chang and King Vidor’s powerful everyman drama The Crowd.
With only six movies competing for two separate awards, it’s no surprise that a number of films–notable in their own rights back then, many considered classics today–can rightly be considered the first Oscar snubs (even thought the name “Oscar” was still a few years away). Let’s take a look at some notable Academy omissions:
Foreign Films Need Not Apply: The Academy Awards are presented, of course, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organization founded to, in part, promote product from the major Hollywood studios. So said Academy backer and M-G-M mogul Louis B. Mayer. It’s no surprise, then, that films not from the U.S. (or, later, the U.K.) were left out of the Best Picture race until Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion broke through in 1938 (Honorary awards were presented intermittently from 1947-55; the Best International Feature Film category didn’t begin until 1957). As a result, such innovative European fare as Alfred Hitchcock’s first suspenser, The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog; Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis; Abel Gance’s innovative biopic Napoleon; and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s emotional The Passion of Joan of Arc didn’t make the cut.
Popular…Maybe Too Popular: Just as there seems to be a lack of top box office films in today’s Best Picture nominee lists, the same could be said for 1929. The biggest hit of 1927 was Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, followed by Warner Bros.’ talking milestone The Jazz Singer. The former was produced by an independent studio, Pathé Exchange. And the latter was seen as a mere “popcorn picture,” although it was given a “Special Award” for its technical innovation. 1928’s top draw was another Al Jolson musical, The Singing Fool, and it suffered the same fate. Other audience favorites the Academy passed on included The Gaucho with Fairbanks; the first “all-talking” film, The Lights of New York; Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Love, an updating of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”; My Best Girl, an early romcom with Fairbanks’ wife, Mary Pickford; and Ernst Lubitsch’s Bavarian melodrama The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.
Comedy and Horror? Not Weighty Enough: The Academy Awards have always tried to use the Best Picture trophy as a way to recognize edifying and culturally significant fare (How else do you justify The English Patient beating out Fargo in 1996?). As such, the genres of Comedy and Horror are often left out of the running. This may explain why Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus was another Special Award recipient but kept off the Best Picture roster, as were Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Speedy with Harold Lloyd. Meanwhile, such silent shockers as Tod Browning’s now-lost London After Midnight with Lon Chaney and Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs with Conrad Veidt were, as one might imagine, deemed too “grotesque” to even consider honoring.