Cinema: Oscars

Last week in Los Angeles’ fancy Hotel Biltmore Bowl, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences bestowed upon the following cinema figures, for the following 1937 achievements, six-inch gilt figurines, strongly resembling radiator-cap sculpture and disparagingly referred to as “Oscars”:

¶Best picture: Warner Brothers, The Life of Emile Zola.

¶Best actor: Spencer Tracy as the bravo fisherman, Manuel, in Captains Courageous.

¶Best actress: Luise Rainer as the Chinese wife, Olan, in The Good Earth.

¶Best direction: Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth.

To Twentieth Century-Fox Producer Darryl F. Zanuck for consistently high quality in 1937 production went the newest & biggest award, an effeminate-looking bust of the late young M-G-M producer, Irving G. Thalberg; to meritorious others, other Oscars, plaques, scrolls. In other years winners were chosen by vote of the Academy members (less than 1,000). This year the chief ones were elected in a poll of 15,000 actors, directors, writers, other eligible Hollywood craftsmen.

Unprecedented in the ten years of Academy prize-giving was Actress Rainer’s second successive Oscar in a three-year film career. She won last year’s for her portrayal of Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld. Sandy, rough-cut Actor Spencer Tracy, recovering in a Los Angeles hospital from a hernia operation, wept when told he had won. Last year’s Oscar to Actor Paul Muni (Louis Pasteur) disappointed many who thought Actor Tracy deserved it for a row of consistently fine jobs (among them: Father Tim in San Francisco, Joe Wilson in Fury). When this year’s balloting named his difficult pidgin-English part in Captains Courageous, many thought the score was about even.