My 1931 Oscar Ballot

We have finished up the 1931-32 Oscars (links to all contests at the bottom of the page), and as we've done for every other season, we're going to finish up with a "My Ballot," where I say whom I would've voted for in all of the categories, including the nominees.  I will totally own, that while I have seen tons of movies for each of these seasons, none felt quite as challenging as this ballot.  When it comes to cinema, I think all time frames are able to create magical movies, and that's true here.  Some of these Best Picture nominees have given me great movie memories, and the top three medalists are truly incredible.  But if you're going to say that there are "favorite eras" of cinema (which for me is the 1940's into the early 1950's, the late 60's into the early 70's, and the early-to-mid aughts), there have to be less favorite eras, and the formative years of sound film are not my favorite.  You'll note on this list that there is still one holdout from the silent era, but we have otherwise worked our way into the sound time frame, and some of the seams in the films I watched of this era did show.  I essentially kept watching these movies until I was feeling genuinely bad about not including specific titles (as we discussed on our 4000th article, a nomination should feel like an achievement, and so if I'm not cutting a good nominee because they're in a very strong sixth place I don't feel like I'm doing right by the year), so I feel strong about what I'm giving you today, but like I said-it took a lot of work (and some research).

The research was necessary because of how we're going to approach this.  We haven't really hit this much, other than extending the Animated Feature race into the pre-2001 races (and keeping Sound Editing post-2020), but the 5th Oscars looked a lot different than what we think of the current Oscars as.  Categories like Best Costume, Score, Movie Song, Makeup, & Visual Effects weren't a thing yet, and they didn't yet have the supporting acting categories.  My thought process was that we keep most of these-film still had makeup, costumes, visual effects, & supporting actors in 1931, so why shouldn't we include them?  We did not include, however, Best Score or Movie Song-the reason for this is that in Silent Era films (and to a slightly lesser degree due to film preservation issues, early sound films) it's challenging to understand what scores were actually in the film when it was made.  Silent films have been remastered, and in many cases the music that is played with the most recent iterations of these pictures is not necessarily what would've played in theaters at the time (in many cases, those were accompanied by an organist or a piano player), so it's hard to judge.  We'll start to grade these in 1934 when Oscar introduces the category instead.  We will therefore end up with 15 categories today-the fifteen categories we will include in every My Ballot throughout this project.

We will also be doing this for just 1931.  I know that Oscar had these split into two calendar years, but I think (after confirming with my brother, who does this project with me), that this is silly, and we will just continue to do calendar years until 1927.  That means that in 1932-33 I'll have to somehow cover two years of this, which will be a logistical nightmare and which is probably why we won't hit that year for a while.  In doing this, though, I ran into two snags.  First, I had to hunt-I like the uniformity of having 10-wide for Best Picture and 5-wide for all of the remaining categories that we'll profile this year when we did them in the 21st Century, and I wanted to keep that.  But Oscar didn't go ten-wide (or 5-wide) in the remaining categories, which meant that, even if I kept all of Oscar's nominees (and I did not...in any category), I had to find additional ones.  Without precursors, with this being the first year where I didn't actually live through the ceremony OR the year (I'm old, I'm not that old), and honestly without a lot of classic films (real talk-aside from Frankenstein, City Lights, & Dracula, no American movies have stayed in collective cinema pop culture too long from 1931) I had to scavenge a bit.  What I came up with I'm proud of, but if your favorite film from 1931 is missing entirely, let me know as it might've gotten lost in the shuffle.

Lastly, the split years meant that I had a snag in my Oscar Viewing Project ethos.  One of the biggest rules of this project has been that I see all of the Oscar nominees in every narrative, feature-length category.  Otherwise it's not an accomplishment.  But since the 1930-31 Oscars (aka the 4th Academy Awards) had at least some 1931 films in them, I had to make a point of seeking out any OVP-eligible films from that year that were made in 1931.  And because I respect this project so much, I did do that even if it meant a bit of a delay in getting this done.  So films like Trader Horn, East Lynne, and Skippy that came out in 1931 are eligible here...they just didn't get nominated because, well, they're terrible.  The 4th Academy Awards, which thanks to this season I have a shockingly large head start upon, is going to be a chore.  But that's a problem for a different day-we are back into the 21st Century to complete the recently finished 96th Academy Awards in the upcoming week, and without further adieu-our oldest My Ballot to date!

Picture

The Champ

City Lights

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

M

Marius

The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

Waterloo Bridge

Gold: Charlie Chaplin's magnum opus, City Lights is a romantic picture, one that shows the Tramp in all of his glory.  As he falls in love, we see why silent film was so special, and the loss that it's extinction represented to the artistry of film, even if sound opened up other doors.  The look on his face as he becomes enamored with Virginia Cherrill-no script could ever produce that.

Silver: Staggeringly modern, and incredibly creepy, Fritz Lang's M shows us the humanity of a murderer, giving us a look at how mob mentality, even toward the worst amongst us, can sometimes give us a slice of the demonic.  Totally original, and even today quite shocking.

Bronze: We have talked about the Frankenstein pictures on this blog (thanks to our October Horror Marathons) more than most, but if you don't know-I love them.  So much.  The way that this unfolds, Karloff's humanity in his terrible creature.  Few films can approach it, and it would be modeled by so many after.

Director

Charlie Chaplin (City Lights)

Alexander Korda (Marius)

Fritz Lang (M)

FW Murnau (Tabu: A Story of the South Seas)

James Whale (Frankenstein)

Gold: I'm going to double-down on City Lights here and give this one to Chaplin too.  I think that's partially because it's hard to argue with Chaplin's visionary approach to film, using less title cards, and just trusting that the audience will be so enthralled with your love story they don't need any guidance of how to feel (which works).

Silver: Close behind it (closer than Best Picture) is a silver medal for Fritz Lang.  I think Lang, similar to Chaplin, gets a lot of the strength from not spoon-feeding anything to the audience.  They understand how truly wicked Peter Lorre is, and they know further still that the mob is not right in their approach to his justice.  Lang's anti-Nazi views show pretty clearly here as we see the rise of Hitler in the film's many villains.

Bronze: We'll throw in a new name for the bronze though (as much as I do love James Whale).  Instead, we'll name Alexander Korda, whose French epic shows a remarkable aptitude for sound.  While other films (even sound films like Frankenstein and M) continued to get their strength more so through the visual, Marius is a story, one that has the guts to end ambiguously in an era where that simply wasn't done.

Actor

Charlie Chaplin (City Lights)

Pierre Fresnay (Marius)

Peter Lorre (M)

Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

Raimu (Marius)

Gold: Peter Lorre would spend much of the 1940's & 50's playing some version of the comic relief henchman that he played in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, and he would do it well (he was marvelous in those movies).  But watching M, you get the sense that we were cheated out of a great screen star, he so perfectly encapsulates the scared monstrosity of his Hans Beckert.

Silver: Chaplin doesn't get a threepeat of gold, but know that I was considering it, and he gets a solid silver.  Comedy in the Silent Era was maybe its best form (that or horror), but you watch Chaplin's performances and they're just on another level.  The way that he combines both his trademark "tramp" slapstick with a more sophisticated amour is heavenly.

Bronze: Raimu's work in Marius is so fascinating, especially in the film's final moments.  He plays this part really well, a father who has an undying love for his son, but doesn't have an understanding of him.  The "parents just don't understand" message was 50 years away, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't capture that sentiment beautifully in pre-war France.

Actress

Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)

Claudette Colbert (The Smiling Lieutenant)

Orane Demazis (Marius)

Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman)

Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)

Gold: Even early on in her career, Barbara Stanwyck finds a way to impart her "smarter-than-the-men" style into her characters.  In The Miracle Woman, she plays an early televangelist, a phony who falls in love with one of the men she claims to have "saved."  Stanwyck's moral dilemmas, and the way that Capra gives her both the bitter & the sweet in the ending, is something only she'd be able to pull off.

Silver: Mae Clarke is playing one of my favorite Vivien Leigh parts, and so it was a tall ask to put her into those shoes, but she does so beautifully.  While Leigh finds the tragedy in the circumstances, Clarke does a better job of finding the morality of what happens-this is a woman gifted a better life, but isn't sure if she can take it knowing that she loves this man so much.  It's a really tender performance from an actress most famous for getting a grapefruit in her face or having to marry a monster.

Bronze: Orane Demazis gets maybe the most complicated role in Marius, as a woman torn between a better life for herself by marrying a man with money, or pursuing her true love Marius, whom she cannot count on to be there for her even if she goes after him.  She balances that really well, and honestly-I can't wait to see what's in store for her as I see the sequel next month.

Supporting Actor

Fernand Charpin (Marius)

Dwight Frye (Dracula)

Gustaf Grundgens (M)

Boris Karloff (Frankenstein)

Harry Myers (City Lights)

Gold: Boris Karloff would end up haunting the dreams of countless moviegoers for generations with his Monster, but it wasn't just that he's scary.  Karloff gives him a grand deal of humanity, someone who has been thrown into an impossible situation, and who shows as much joy in destroying as he does in celebrating the world around him.

Silver: Fernand Charpin plays the "other man" in the principle love triangle in Marius, but he does so to both great comedic & adversarial effect.  I loved the way that Honoré is not a true villain, but someone lonely, and being encouraged by Fanny's aunt to think that it's a viable match.  He steals most of the scenes he's in, even against some stiff acting competition.

Bronze: Gustaf Grundgens' personal life is questionable when giving out a statue, but these need to be won solely on performance, and his work in M is extraordinary.  A large part of Fritz Lang's story is that you will find a villainy in every character, not just the ones who are obvious, and Grundgens gives us maybe the film's scariest figure as the Safecracker and chief judge in Hans Beckert's court.

Supporting Actress

Joan Blondell (Night Nurse)

Virginia Cherrill (City Lights)

Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant)

Alida Rouffe (Marius)

Gold: Like Best Actress, our Supporting Actress is getting a gold with a double nomination year (I don't follow Oscar rules-actors can get nominated twice in the same category).  And you deserve two nominations if you're giving performances as good as Miriam Hopkins was in 1931.  For her win, I'm going to go with her tragic turn in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  She brings something beyond just screaming victim here, and gives us a true loss of innocence as she is brought into the world of the nasty Edward Hyde.

Silver: Joan Blondell is one of those actresses you know is famous, but is rarely name-checked as a great actress of her era.  But twenty years before her forgettable Oscar nomination, she totally earned one as the worldly best friend to Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse, giving us a counter to Stanwyck's noble heroine.

Bronze: Finishing off the acting contests is Virginia Cherrill's angelic Blind Girl in City Lights.  If you're going to pull off the most romantic scene (possibly) in film history, you need to find a way to have strength, tenderness, & a different kind of shyness than Chaplin is bringing, and Cherrill does that in her work here.

Adapted Screenplay

Frankenstein

Marius

The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant

Waterloo Bridge

Gold: Bringing Mary Shelley's epistolary novel to life on the big-screen was no easy task.  It isn't entirely made for the movies (at least not the movies of 1931), and some of the choices (like making the monster unable to speak) are honestly really smart decisions by the screenwriters of Frankenstein-they'd set up nearly 100 years of lore around the creature we still see in the films today.

Silver: Close behind Frankenstein is Marius, which would've won if it wasn't competing with an icon.  After all, this is a shockingly sophisticated story of love, dreams, & money, told at the dawn of the sound era but you'd be forgiven for thinking this was coming a decade later the story feels so perfectly plotted.

Bronze: Our final medalist is The Smiling Lieutenant, which gets on this list not just for being the funniest film of 1931, but also for being the bawdiest.  Combined with some delicious musical arrangement (try not to grin during "Jazz Up Your Lingerie") the Lubitsch touch is in full effect as we get ribald humor between Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, & Miriam Hopkins.

Original Screenplay

The Champ

City Lights

M

Monkey Business

Smart Money

Gold: Few films of this era had such political insight and layered metaphors as Fritz Lang's M (which he also co-wrote).  Look at the way that he handles the police and the criminals similar approach to capturing Hans Beckert...Lang wants you to know in 1931 Germany, even the institutions are rotten (and boy was he right).

Silver: Silent films obviously don't have spoken screenplays, and so a lack of dialogue sometimes feels a bit of a cheat for competing for an award like this.  But Chaplin's City Lights is so wonderfully-plotted, giving us side adventures, but ones that always build back to the final moments of the film.  All of his pictures have this attention-to-detail, but this one in particular is the best-constructed.

Bronze: We're finishing off with our first film that also won the Oscar (I really abandoned the Academy's choices this year, especially deprived of their much better 1932 films) The Champ, which is a tearjerker, but one that balances a sense of masculinity and forgotten dreams into what easily could've just been a family boxing flick.  This became formative for a reason.

Sound

Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

M

The Miracle Woman

Gold: We're combining effects & mixing into one category (we'll split them starting in the 1960's when editing became more of a standard practice...and also something I could genuinely tell apart from the mixing), and we're giving this statue to a film that had both, Frankenstein, a movie that not only has angry mobs & a lumbering monster, but the staggering screams of "it's alive!" that ring as some of the most memorable in film history.

Silver: Following it, we're going to go to the other monster of 1931, always in Karloff's shadow: Dracula.  Here the sound work is more sophisticated, more subtle, but nonetheless just as effective, particularly the way it seems to drip on Lugosi's accent in the early scenes to make him as menacing as possible.

Bronze: A trio of horror medalists (a first for this blog), we'll conclude with the nasty transformations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the way that it uses silence and screams to instill terror in its audience.

Art Direction

Dracula

Frankenstein

M

A Nous la Liberte

Transatlantic

Gold: I am a sucker for world-building when it comes to this category (look how many nominations I gave the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films in the 21st Century), and no film is world-building quite like Frankenstein does in 1931.  The castle, the moat, the village...it's all splendid.

Silver: The modernist designs of A Nous la Liberte are arguably more inventive than Frankenstein (which is more iconic...you decide which is more impressive but I lean toward the Monster).  I love the way that it feels like it's pulling you into a world of the future that's not entirely happy.  Capitalism has never looked so depressing (and that's a good thing).

Bronze: The thing about M is that the art direction feels like it's part of the film.  The city streets become more claustrophobic the further we get into the film, as Hans Beckert can feel the world collapsing on itself, and the courtroom in the final scenes feels truly underground, somewhere where no one is going to escape.

Cinematography

City Lights

Frankenstein

M

Marius

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

Gold: Few men of his era knew quite how to lens a film in as horrifying of a manner as Frtiz Arno Wagner, who was the genius behind such pictures as Nosferatu and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.  With M, though, he gives maybe his best work, giving us some early tracking shots and a type of visual storytelling that would make the film the classic that it is.

Silver: Tabu is not a well-remembered film, but it won an Oscar for Cinematography for a reason-it's gorgeous.  Floyd Crosby's camerawork here, particularly the swimming sequences, kind of have to be seen to be believed, they are so technically impressive & beautifully-captured.

Bronze: Frankenstein does better with lighting night scenes than most modern blockbusters do.  The way that it captures moments in a graveyard, at a castle's doorsteps, and of course in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory are a play of light-and-shadow, all marvelously lit but with an ominous sense of dread.

Costume

Dishonored

Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

Mata Hari

Gold: Few women are as fashionable throughout all of their careers as Marlene Dietrich, and her dresses in Dishonored are about as delicious as you can get.  I particularly love the shiny black number with the silver cape and a chain necklace, looking like she's either been released from the Met Gala or the world's most expensive dominatrix club.

Silver: Sometimes you get in based solely on a dress into this category, sometimes it's a cavalcade of outfits strung together.  For Frankenstein, it's a pair of looks.  First you have Boris Karloff's lumbering corpse, in a stiff & slightly dated suit that looks like he was, well, buried in it, and then you have Mae Clarke's gorgeous bridal gown, a combination of elegant evening gown with a flapper headdress that, honestly, would still be in style.

Bronze: If you're going to unleash the most stylish monster in horror movie history, you need him to look good.  That's what the costume team in Dracula does for Bela Lugosi, putting him in smashing evening wear, to go along with the increasingly sexy evening wear worn by Helen Chandler's Mina as the film progresses.

Film Editing

City Lights

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

M

Marius

Gold: Once again we are going with M for the gold medal (its total is one short of Frankenstein), but can you blame me?  The building suspense in this picture, not just as we want to capture Hans Beckert, but the fear of what happens when we do, is gripping-your-seat sorts of horror, and the film's visual cues (particularly the use of the actual "M") are so well-considered.

Silver: Behind it we have Frankenstein, another film winning mostly because of its thrills, but that's not the only thing that makes it work.  Think of a scene like the resurrection sequence-this isn't necessarily meant to be scary, but the way that it's pieced together (including Colin Clive's shrieks) makes it that way...we are about to tempt the hand of god.

Bronze: We'll complete the trio with Marius, which doesn't have the crutch of a horror film to guide it, but instead a growing series of storylines that are being intertwined.  This was not something movies of this era did well.  Part of the reason supporting performances weren't recognized until the mid-1930's was they weren't really consequential to the plot (B Plots or Side Plots weren't really a thing), but Marius does it aptly, feeling at times like it's inventing this style of moviemaking it's so advanced.

Makeup & Hairstyling

Dishonored

Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

M

Gold: Horror movies rarely get honored for makeup, but they should, and 1931 is about as perfect of an example as you could find as to why.  Think of what Jack Pierce is doing in Frankenstein, giving us a monster that, quite honestly, we don't even see as green, but we can feel it in the way that he makes it decay, realistic but still clearly undead.  It's chilling.

Silver: Fast behind him is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Wally Westmore (of the famed family) uses both visual trickery (we'll get into that in a second) and makeup effects to create the transformation, and when we get the actual Mr. Hyde, he's a brutal figure, one that cannot be denied (and you better not try).

Bronze: We are finishing off with Dracula.  This isn't as showy (the prosthetics aren't as necessary on either Bela Lugosi or his brides), but most doesn't always equal best, and the placid, nearly translucent looks shown by he and the women he's entombed in his castle are really defining stuff for the vampire genre.

Visual Effects

Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Frankenstein

Taris

Waterloo Bridge

Gold: We'll have a flip of the script and give this one to Dr. Jekyll.  The movie's most famous sequence is the transformation scene, with Fredric March staring straight into the camera, no cuts away, and watching as he slowly gets blotches on his face and darkness under his eyes...it's insane this was done without CGI, but instead color filters on the lens and extensive (and precise) makeup.  It's genius work.

Silver: Similar to Dr. Jekyll, the visual effects of Frankenstein in some capacity can be caught in the flashing lights, production design, and practical effects of the resurrection scene.  We see a fission of sound, art direction, & glowing lights all in one breathtaking moment.

Bronze: We'll keep the three horror films together for a final time, and again Dracula is a bit less showy, a bit more subtle.  But this one uses practical effects, including lighting tricks to highlight Lugosi's face and to have him vanish into a bat, to give us a complete ambience.

Also in 1931-32: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Other My Oscar Ballots: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

OVP: Picture (1931-32)

 OVP: Best Picture (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Arrowsmith (Samuel Goldwyn Productions)

Bad Girl (20th Century Fox)

The Champ (MGM)

Five Star Final (First National)

Grand Hotel (MGM)

One Hour with You (Paramount)

Shanghai Express (Paramount)

The Smiling Lieutenant (Paramount)

My Thoughts: And we officially have reached the end of our shortest season (ever?...perhaps ever, I haven't actually checked if there's a year with less categories) of the Oscar Viewing Project.  We are also into the only category that had more than 3 nominations, and because of that, we're going to get to some films that we've not yet discussed, a first for us.  Four of these movies received only Best Picture nominations, including the film that won Best Picture, which was the first, last, and only time that Oscar will ever do that.  So not only did we not get tired of any films in a season this short, some of them we barely noticed.

Let's in fact start right out of the gate with Grand Hotel.  I have seen Grand Hotel more than any other movie on this list (it's the only one I've seen more than once), and it still holds up every time.  The movie's genius lies in the way that it's not just about people that are lost, but in many ways people who are damned.  Everyone will go to Grand Hotel, everyone will find a way to its melodrama and its ability to force conversations about love and betrayal and the future, and I suspect, one person will always perish so the rest will find a way to move on from its elegant surroundings.  The cast of this movie wonderfully inhabits that feeling-it really is the MGM factory working at all cylinders.

No one directs a film quite like John Ford, but that doesn't mean he's infallible, and that's true in Arrowsmith.  The movie uses a now basically dead film genre (the medical drama is almost exclusively confined to our TV screens) but doesn't give us any of the tension we know it's capable of from years of ER and Grey's Anatomy.  The film tamps down its most salacious aspects (Ronald Colman & Myrna Loy are clearly having sex), but doesn't fill it with anything more rewarding.  Throw in Helen Hayes overacting, and you've got a big, boring misdirect.

Five Star Final is a really hard movie to judge on its overall merits because the screenplay is quite solid.  The movie's take criticizing newspapers for ruining people's lives in the name of "journalism" when it's really just petty gossip is pointed (and sadly apt nearly 100 years later).  But the picture doesn't work as well as the idea of it does.  Most of the actors in the film feel an ill-fit.  Even figures like Edward G. Robinson & Boris Karloff (both of whom I generally like), can't land their character arcs, and the story doesn't really know how to make up for it (they leave for larger stretches of the film than you'd think given the movie's shorter runtime).  Honestly, and I don't say this often: the movie desperately needed to be longer.

Trying to keep the two Lubitsch films (both of which star Maurice Chevalier) apart is why I made a point of taking specific notes for this write-up.  The Smiling Lieutenant is filled with absurdist humor and some truly saucy screenwriting involving the love triangle between Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, & Miriam Hopkins.  Possibly the most "Pre-Code" film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, the movie is  very naughty, including conversations about post-coital meals and songs about revealing lingerie.  It all works really well-we need more horny musicals, and Chevalier is actually as sexy as filmmakers claim he is in later films (when he is not).

That said, One Hour with You is even better.  Chevalier is not just sexy as hell, but he's also giving a really good performance, and is matched by delicious supporting turns from Genevieve Tobin & Roland Young.  The writing in this is sublime ("Professor Olivier...Ancient History!") and like Smiling is filled with a bunch of raunchy double entendres that Will Hayes stole from us for the remainder of the decade.  The movie doesn't need to be a musical, and unlike Smiling, the numbers aren't fun enough to work, but it's so funny and sophisticated that you should see it immediately if this is the first you're hearing of it.

Frank Borzage's Bad Girl is one of those movies I'm just never going to get the appeal of.  Looking at the Letterboxd reviews, I'm clearly in the minority on this one, but Minna Gombell's sassy friend aside, I think it's a snore.  The script makes zero sense (even in the world of the movies, the misunderstandings between the two leads are so asinine as to border on incredulity), and the entire concept of it being called "Bad Girl" goes out the window when Sally Eilers is as prim as a Colleen Dewhurst school marm.  I just...it's so disposable.

You can not say that The Champ is disposable, and indeed, it's the film that is maybe the most beloved by modern cinephiles of these eight?  The most surprising thing about it to me wasn't that it was a compelling drama, but that it was so obsessed with the concept of masculinity.  Wallace Beery's father has to contend not just with finding a way to love his son, but also to understand if his son can have a better life without him (and what he gave up in his life by not fulfilling his greatest dreams in his youth).  That the filmmakers smartly have Jackie Cooper's eyes be a reflection of that (with Cooper honestly giving an even better performance than Beery), makes the film's final moments that much more poignant.

Grand Hotel is the most insightful, The Champ the most moving, and One Hour with You the funniest, but when we get to Shanghai Express, we are met with the most beautiful.  Few films have ever looked as good as what Josef von Sternberg is doing in this movie.  The cinematography is exquisite, clouds of puffy smoke coming off of both the titular train and Marlene Dietrich's cigarette, the two intertwined for the whole picture.  The movie doesn't quite have the guts to give us the ending the script is demanding, but you don't care while watching it-film is a visual medium, and von Sternberg understands that better than any other director of his time.

Other Precursor Contenders: Once again, we have no precursors.  At the time, Scarface was expected to score somewhere and given that we have four films that only got Best Picture nominations, and also remembering that movie's box office, I wonder if that was probably in ninth place even if it didn't get a single Oscar nomination.  If you want to go into the actual nominees, I would assume What Price Hollywood? and The Guardsman (given the categories they got into) would be a good place to start.

Films I Would Have Nominated: You'll find out tomorrow!

Oscar’s Choice: I'm assuming that the MGM star machine (and the box office that came with it) was too much for The Champ or Arrowsmith to overcome, and that's why Grand Hotel reigned supreme.

My Choice: I'm going to echo Oscar, but it's a close race with Shanghai Express.  I think Shanghai is the more impressive feat, but movies are not just about cinematography, and the acting & screenwriting in Grand Hotel are better, and ultimately push the scales.  Behind them, I'd go (in order) One Hour with You, The Smiling Lieutenant, The Champ, Five Star, Final, Arrowsmith, and then Bad Girl.

And there you have it-another OVP in the books.  Are we all going to stay at the Grand Hotel with Oscar & I, or do you want to venture to another destination?  Which of the four films that only got one nomination do you most wish made it somewhere else?  And overall-what is your favorite movie of 1931-32?  Share your comments below!

Also in 1931-32: Director, Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Picture Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

OVP: Director (1931-32)

OVP: Best Director (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Frank Borzage, Bad Girl

King Vidor, The Champ

Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express

My Thoughts: Coming off of yesterday's Best Actress field, I am happy to report that we are in much better territory for Best Director.  Unlike Best Actress, this features at least one truly worthy nominee, and one nominee that is no slouch.  It also features three distinctive film directors.  King Vidor & Frank Borzage would gain reputations as some of the better "directors for hire" of Hollywood's Golden Age, sometimes getting lost in their reputations the fact that they had gifts.  Vidor's The Crowd and Borzage's Moonrise, for example, are pretty much perfect films, and their best work (in my opinion).  But only one of these guys is generally given the title of "auteur" and given his cinematic output in the early Sound Era, it's easy to see why.

Josef von Sternberg is that director, who from 1927-1935 was one of the most interesting filmmakers working in cinema, first in Germany, then in the United States.  In that time, he made seven movies with Marlene Dietrich, two of which won him Best Director nominations (the other one was Morocco).  Watching Shanghai Express, it's sometimes confusing how good the movie is because it looks so incredible.  Von Sternberg did impossible things with a camera, giving us a beautiful depth in his films that no American filmmaker would be able to achieve until Orson Welles.  I love the way he moves the camera from different shots, sometimes giving us the action at the center, sometimes moving it to the side, playing with the script visually to the point where you don't really care that the story doesn't make a lot of sense.

Frank Borzage's work in Bad Girl isn't nearly as stylized or sophisticated, and that's especially true when it's paired with such a defanged screenplay.  For a movie literally called Bad Girl, it's quite prudish in its approach, and Borzage doesn't know how to make the weakest of film setups (just a series of misunderstandings between a married couple) elevate into something special.  I know there are people who are champions of this movie, and lord knows in 1932 there were given its Oscar history, but I don't get it at all.  It's less bad and more just confusing in its critical acclaim.

The final nomination is much easier to understand.  Vidor does a superb job of framing the fighting scenes against the action outside of the ring.  I loved the way that the story is built around "the big fight" but by the time it's come, the stakes of what it's supposed to be about have completely changed.  Vidor knows that this movie is not just about economy (and it so easily could've been only about that), but instead about the ways that masculinity (and how it is valued over love) can weaken the resolves of even the strongest of men.  Watching Beery lose his battles to his former glory is heartbreaking.

Other Precursor Contenders: Of the five films that didn't get a Best Director nomination, but did get in for Best Picture, we have Ernst Lubitsch directing two (likely cancelling himself out), and while it would be tempting to pick the Best Picture winner, Edmund Goulding has no Oscar history and Grand Hotel is more of a call sheet film.  Therefore I'm going to assume it was either John Ford for Arrowsmith or Mervyn LeRoy for Five Star Final, and given Ford has the longer Oscar history, he'd be my guess.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: Howard Hawks is one of the most consistent filmmakers in Classical Hollywood, directing classics in every genre from film noir (The Big Sleep) to screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby) to westerns (Red River) to Science Fiction (The Thing from Another World).  He somehow only got one nomination, for the total snooze Sergeant York.  A perfect time to honor him would've been for 1932's Scarface with Paul Muni, a total achievement and the best early gangster film of the 1930's.
Oscar's Choice: I cannot explain it, but Frank Borzage won.  Given he already had a statue and Vidor & von Sternberg would never win one, it feels like a particularly stupid indulgence from the Academy.

My Choice: It's absolutely von Sternberg, who is in another class with Shanghai Express.  Behind him is Vidor, and then Borzage is forgettably in third.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you sticking with me and giving this statue to von Sternberg (his personal life aside) or do you want to go with AMPAS and Frank Borzage?  What would you consider to be the best film of these three men, all quite prolific directors in their day?  And was it Ford, LeRoy, Goulding, or Lubitsch in fourth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 1931-32: Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Director Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

OVP: Actress (1931-32)

OVP: Best Actress (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Marie Dressler, Emma

Lynn Fontanne, The Guardsman

Helen Hayes, The Sin of Madelon Claudet

My Thoughts: There are a lot of really terrific lineups that Oscar has pulled together through the years.  Some, like 2001 Best Score, it's so good it still haunts my dreams over what I picked to win, while others (like 2007 Cinematography) I stand tall in my victor choice, but I am just in awe of how strong the quintet that Oscar picked is.  Best Actress of 1931-32...is not one of those lineups.  I currently have 121 Best Actress nominations left to see (I'll hit one more this week, so watch me on Letterboxd if you don't already as I post every film review there rather than just ones that fit our series here), but of the years that I have finished, this is easily the worst Best Actress lineup I've encountered.  I don't even like any of these nominations (none of them will show up in my My Ballot later this week), but the rules of the OVP are simple-I gotta pick at least one of them to win, and so we shall proceed.

Marie Dressler is the best film actress of these three (the other two are such stage legends they both got Broadway theaters named after them but Dressler knew movies), and was coming off of an Oscar win the previous year with Emma.  But this has none of the fight of Min and Bill, and Dressler is largely relegated to window dressing in Emma.  The film plays out like a melodrama, and her broad-as-a-barn comedy style is a bad fit for a character that is meant to have some more tender feelings at the end of the picture that I don't think she connected with.  Dressler is very watchable, it's worth noting, but she's not super good in this (and neither is the film itself).

Helen Hayes film was a mixed bag even when it came out (I cannot remember which film critic called it this, but they dubbed it The Sin of Maudlin Claudet) which is both bitchy & accurate.  Hayes plays this character to the hilt, but unlike Dressler has a bit more fun with the camp.  She's not as good of a movie star as Dressler, but she's probably a better actor underneath it all, and it shows as the film progresses, with her getting to scenery-chew, but generally in a way that doesn't make you want to click the remote.  Neither of Hayes Oscar wins were for particularly good movies, which is a pity given how storied her acting legend was in her lifetime.

Speaking of storied acting legends, we have Lynn Fontanne.  Some actresses of her era, like Jeanne Eagels, were able to get to the big screen and just nail their first roles in the cinema.  Fontanne...does not.  The performance probably would've worked on a stage, but we aren't watching on a stage-we're walking on a big-screen, and neither she nor her husband Alfred Lunt can sell this one-note, staid affair, and it feels like they neither make sense as romantic partners in the film, nor as sentient human beings given how stupid the premise of this picture is.  Hard pass.

Other Precursor Contenders: I would assume that in fourth place was one of the women that had recently been nominated for Best Actress and were starring in Best Picture nominees, Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express) or Greta Garbo (Grand Hotel).  Perhaps the two (who had a frosty real-life relationship) split the gorgeous European-goddess vote, but it's weird that neither of them got into this field, especially as Dressler & Hayes were their films only citations.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Dietrich, without a doubt.  The work she's doing in Shanghai Express is not the best she's ever done, but she looks so damned beautiful it's kind of another level of acting (and she is, for the record, terrific).

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar could not deny Helen Hayes playing a hooker (which would become a route that would work for everyone from Donna Reed to Elizabeth Taylor to Kim Basinger in the years that followed).

My Choice: I feel the need to point out that I give Oscars for the OVP in a vacuum.  Marie Dressler, for example, is the better movie star and by far my favorite performer of these three...giving her a statue right now would mean I don't have to worry about her getting bumped for Min and Bill the previous year, which is a field I haven't yet completed so I don't know if she's safe.  But that's not how this works, and of the three, based solely on what's in front of me, I think Hayes is more interesting and "deserves" the win in a field I don't like at all.  Dressler follows, then Fontanne.

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  Are you sticking with Oscar and I with Hayes, or do you want to strike out on your own?  Am I alone in thinking that this is Oscar's worst Best Actress lineup?  And why did Garbo & Dietrich not get layup nominations this year?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Also in 1931-32: Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Actress Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

OVP: Actor (1931-32)

OVP: Best Actor (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Wallace Beery, The Champ

Alfred Lunt, The Guardsman

Fredric March, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

My Thoughts: We are moving next into the Best Actor field, which in 1931-32 was a bit different than what we'd expect today for said field.  For starters, there were no supporting performances nominated in their own category.  This didn't always mean, though, that there were no supporting performances in general.  Oftentimes, we'd see performances (such as Franchot Tone in Mutiny on the Bounty) that would've been supporting in a normal year still get into lead.  In fact, Tone's nomination against his costars Clark Gable & Charles Laughton in much bigger roles, became one of the principle reasons that Oscar created the supporting categories.  But for this field, we've got three actors very much taking the lead...and in a first-and-only case for this category, more than one of them won the category.

We'll start with the guy that didn't win, Alfred Lunt.  Lunt was a major star on the boards, eventually having a Broadway theater named after he and his wife Lynn Fontanne.  They rarely worked together on screen, and after seeing The Guardsman, I kind of get why.  The two do not modulate well (at all) to the movies, playing to the back of the rafters, and it's too hammy.  Lunt plays dual roles, but only an idiot would ever be convinced they aren't the same person, to the point where you spend much of the movie wondering why the character's marriage works.  It's a total waste, and the only good thing about this nomination is that it provides a decent amount of trivia given how strange a married couple getting nominated for the same film is.

The other two films are better, and Fredric March is a good reminder as to how someone can be theatrical and still marvelous onscreen.  His work as both the kindly Dr. Jekyll and the notorious Mr. Hyde are fantastic.  I love the ways that he plays them so differently, when notes of each character play in the other, it feels like it's almost the character breaking through, and not just because it's the same actor playing the part.  Kudos have to go to the terrific makeup & visual effects teams responsible here, but it wouldn't work if you weren't properly terrified of March on the big screen.

Wallace Beery is our final nominee.  Beery's work in The Champ is widely celebrated now, perhaps more so than even fellow winner March, because it's such a textbook example of a father-and-son sports movie.  I will own that I think Jackie Cooper is actually better in this movie than Beery is (I think he lands some of the bigger moments at the end, and unlike Beery, he doesn't have a clear back story that we're skipping over & making the film feel thinner), but this is a fine, if two-dimensional look at the way our crushed dreams never truly leave us.

Other Precursor Contenders: I think if we are looking for the fourth place here, it's going to be one of two people.  The first would be Jackie Cooper, who had to have just missed for his child star turn in The Champ...I wonder if a year after he was nominated for Skippy if the Academy didn't think it was appropriate to nominate a child actor for back-to-back statues.  The other option would be Ronald Colman, whose staid work in Arrowsmith isn't nearly as good as Cooper's, but given his decent run at the Oscars (four nominations and one statue in total), he was probably on their radar.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Lionel and Ethel Barrymore both won Oscars at some point in their careers, but their brother John (the tragic Barrymore sibling) never got nominated, and it's a damned shame as he was one of the most consistent presences in early sound film.  Surely there was room for him for Grand Hotel?

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar's choice was Fredric March, but thanks to a strange anomaly in the Oscar bylaws which resulted in a tie if you were separated by three or less votes (this would be changed afterward), Wallace Beery was also honored for Best Actor having lost by only one vote to March, so both of them won the statue.

My Choice: First off, if I get only one year to give out a tie for Best Actor, it's going to go to something like 1962 or 1974, not this year, which I'll happily hand to March.  Beery follows, then Lunt...which is the first time I can say with absolute certainty that Oscar & I matched exactly.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  What do you think of Oscar's tie rule-do you wish they'd bring it back (and invite more ties)?  Am I alone in thinking that Alfred Lunt is not strong in The Guardsman?  And between Cooper & Colman, who do you think just missed this lineup?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 1931-32: Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Actor Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022