Ahead of Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, let’s take a few minutes to consider some of the unlikeliest nominations and winners in the history of cinema’s most prestigious prize.
Who Saw This Coming? Few people expected Hal Mohr to win the 1935 Best Cinematography Oscar for “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” – if only because he wasn’t nominated. In the mid-1930s, the Academy changed its rules to allow write-in votes to go alongside the ballot nominees, but after write-in candidate Mohr won his award the rules were rewritten to prevent another write-in winner.
A Little Off-Key. For the 1942 Oscars, “Pig Foot Pete” was one of the 10 nominees for the Best Song award, but there were two problems with that nomination. First, the Academy linked the song to the film “Hellzapoppin’,” but it was not part of that soundtrack – it appeared in the Abbott & Costello film “Keep ‘Em Flying.” But that created another problem – “Keep ‘Em Flying” came out in 1941, making the song ineligible for consideration. Nonetheless, the erroneous nomination is still recognized by the Academy.
A Class by Itself. There were no Academy Awards when Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic “The Gold Rush” was released. In 1942, Chaplin put forth an updated version of the film with a new music score and re-edited sequences. Incredibly, the Academy broke with precedent to nominate this version of “The Gold Rush” for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture and Best Sound Recording. This marked the only time that a re-released film was entered in Oscar competition.
The Write Stuff. The 29th Academy Awards were notable for multiple anomalies in the writing categories. At this time, blacklisted creative artists were barred from being nominated for the Oscar. For the 1956 release “Friendly Persuasion,” Allied Artists decided not to give screen credit to the blacklisted Michael Wilson, but the members of the screenwriters’ branch put forth “Friendly Persuasion” for the Adapted Screenplay award even though there was no credited writer – the only time that ever occurred. Another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, won the Best Writing (Motion Picture Story) Award for “The Brave One” – his nomination was submitted under the pseudonym Robert Rich, but most Hollywood writers knew the credited author’s identity and intentionally voted for Trumbo. Also in Trumbo’s category was the nomination of Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman for their story for “High Society” – but Academy voters mistakenly believed that was the MGM musical when, in fact, it was a Bowery Boys comedy. Bernds and Ullman graciously withdrew their names from consideration.
Blink And You Miss An Oscar Nominee. Oscar trivia buffs know that Beatrice Straight’s 5-minute 2-second performance in “Network” (1976) was the shortest performance to win an Academy Award, but her screen time seemed epic compared to the work of Hermione Baddeley in the 1959 “Room at the Top.” Although Baddeley was only given 2 minutes and 19 seconds of screen time across three small scenes, it was enough to earn her a Best Supporting Actress nomination, making her appearance the briefest to gain Academy notice. See for yourself what piqued the Oscar voters:
A Belated Disqualification. “Young Americans,” the winner of the 1968 Best Documentary Award, has the unfortunate distinction of being the only film to have its Academy Award revoked. Several weeks after the Oscar ceremony, it was discovered that this nonfiction film about on the Young Americans musical choir had theatrical playdates in 1967, thus making it ineligible for the 1968 award. “Journey Into Self,” the runner-up in the Oscar voting, was given the honor months after the awards ceremony.
An Oscar in Less Than Three Minutes. The shortest film to win an Academy Award was “The Crunch Bird,” a 2-minute 20-second production by Detroit cartoonists Joe Petrovich and Ted Petok that won the Best Animated Short Subject Award for 1971. Petrovich and Petok submitted their work for Oscar consideration on a dare, never dreaming that such a micro-movie would gain the grand prize. But “The Crunch Bird” was not the shortest film ever to be Oscar nominated – the 1-minute 41-second “Fresh Guacamole” from the animator PES was up for the 2012 Best Animated Short Subject prize.
Musical Mayhem. After the 1972 Best Dramatic Score award nominees were announced, Nino Rota’s nomination for “The Godfather” was revoked after it was discovered he reused music from the 1958 film “Fortunella.” The Academy’s music branch was reconvened to vote on a replacement nominee – the first time something like that ever happened. John Addison’s score for “Sleuth” became the replacement choice, losing to the 1952 Charlie Chaplin film “Limelight” score. The 20-year-old film was considered eligible because it never played in Los Angeles at the time of its premiere – Chaplin was suspected of being a Communist during the McCarthy era and no West Coast theater would show the film.
Dial-An-Oscar-Nominee. Songwriters Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster managed to score a 1976 Best Song nomination for “A World That Never Was” featured in “Half a House,” a small independent film with a scant theatrical distribution. Because there were no funds to mount a full-blown awards campaign, Fain and Webster set up a phone number with a recording of the song and asked Academy members to call and listen to the tune. It wasn’t enough – “Evergreen” from the Barbra Streisand version of “A Star is Born” was the year’s winner.
The Only Oscar-Nominated Dog. For the Best Adapted Screenplay competition among the 1984 films, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle” brought in nominations for P.H. Vazak and Michael Austin. Vazak was a new name to the Oscar voters, but few realized that it was actually the Hungarian sheepdog belonging to Robert Towne, a previous Oscar winner for “Chinatown.” Towne was furious at the changes made to his script and demanded that his name be removed, using his dog’s moniker as the replacement. Thus, history was made with the first (and, to date, only) canine nominee for the Academy Award.
Photo: Hermione Baddeley and Laurence Harvey in “Room at the Top.”