What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1946

The Year: 1946

What the Nominees Were: The Best Years of Our Lives, Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Razor’s Edge, The Yearling
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s brilliant spy thriller Notorious and Rita Hayworth’s star turn in Gilda.

What Did Win: The Best Years of Our Lives
How It’s Aged: Beautifully. This is one of the all-time great movies, and deserves so much credit for daringly confronting the big problems facing new veterans coming home from the war, not always getting the warm reception we associate with the “greatest generation.”

What Should’ve Won: It’s a Wonderful Life

How Hard Was the Decision: It was very hard to take away the Oscar from The Best Years of Our Lives, but ultimately it couldn’t compete. I religiously rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life every year, and appreciate it more and more each time, whereas I was content to watch Best Years just once.

Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Screenplay by Capra, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Additional scenes by Jo Swerling. Based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern
Stars: Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell and Henry Travers

The Story: Small town building-and-loan manager George Bailey is considering suicide, (not realizing that town miser Mr. Potter has stolen his bank deposit) so some blinking stars in heaven review his life story, then send oddball angel Clarence down to help. Clarence decides to show George what life would have been like if he’d never been born, which convinces him that he’s actually had a wonderful life.

Any Nominations or Wins: Its only win was for “Technical Achievement.” It lost Picture, Director, Actor, Editing, and Sound.

Why It Didn’t Win: Capra was the king of the Oscars before he went off to war, but now he had come home to a chillier environment.  His old-fashioned style was considered out-of-touch with modern postwar times.  Perhaps this movie is simultaneously too dark (concerned with suicide) and too light (a literal deus ex machina) to win big awards, especially when put up against a very worthy winner like Best Years. Famously, this movie lost money when it came out and didn’t become a legendary classic until it fell into the public domain and TV stations could run it for free during Christmastime.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is, fundamentally, one of the weirdest movies ever made. George’s non-magical life story is long enough and compelling enough to fill a movie, and the whole Clarence storyline doesn’t even start until an hour and forty minutes in, suddenly taking things in a supernatural direction. Capra’s critics always called his movies “Capra-corn”, and surely nothing is cornier than angelic intervention, but it’s a brilliant move. The angel storyline only works because the movie was already a moving and satisfying story without it.
2. Every year, when we rewatched this movie growing up, the question was, should we then rewatch the Saturday Night Live skit where Uncle Billy remembers that Potter has the money and they all go beat the crap out of him? The problem is that, once you’ve seen the skit, it’s hard not to want to see that every year, but of course, the fact that the villain gets away with his villainy is one thing that makes this movie so great. Evil does not triumph, but it doesn’t suffer any consequences either, and our knowledge of that is part of why the end is so tear-jerking.
   
   
   
3. One of the first things we hear in that movie is that Clarence the angel has "the I.Q. of a rabbit." But can we now admit that he's actually a genius? Jumping in the river is genius. Showing George what would happen if he was never born is also genius. A brilliant outside-the-box solution and it was maybe the only thing that would have worked.
   
   
   
4. Why do millions of Americans rewatch this old black and white movie every year? Because its concerns about income equality and housing insecurity are evergreen. As an internet meme always points out at Christmas time, it’s still hard for a working man to save $5000, even eighty years later.
5. The case can be made that Stewart gives the greatest film performance ever. My favorite moment: When he’s sharing the phone with Mary and says “And I don’t want to get married, ever! To anyone!” Cut to: He’s happily getting married to her. We don’t need to see everything that happens in the meantime because Stewart had it all in his voice while protesting that he didn’t want it.
   
   
   

Ah, 1946: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1945

The Year: 1945

What the Nominees Were: Anchors Aweigh, The Bells of Saint Mary’s, The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. If the Academy had cast its eye abroad the French movie Children of Paradise would surely have been a tempting pick.

What Did Win: The Lost Weekend
How It’s Aged: Billy Wilder’s story of a brutal bender is a great film and well worth watching, but it’s just a bit too melodramatic for my tastes. The heavy score (including lots of theremin!) makes things rather heavy-handed, and the somewhat happy ending feels unearned. It would have been a lot more daring if they hadn’t cut out the real reason why he was drinking from the novel: he was repressing his homosexuality.

 
What Should’ve Won: Scarlet Street
How Hard Was the Decision: I had to rewatch The Lost Weekend to make sure of my decision. It was hard to take away Wilder’s Oscar, but of course I gave him one last year, so that lets Fritz Lang sneak in this year. Those were the only two movies I seriously considered, though Mildred Pierce is great.

Director: Fritz Lang
Writer: Dudley Nichols, based on the novel “La Chienne” by Georges De La Fouchardiere and Andre Mouezy-Eon
Stars: Edgar G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea

The Story: Robinson is a meek little bank clerk, unhappily married, who wants to be a painter, but he’s always had a problem with perspective. He falls under the spell of a femme fatale who falsely assumes that his odd little paintings are worth big money. Afraid to disillusion her, he has to support her with embezzled money. Things get complicated when her no-good boyfriend discovers that the paintings are worthless, and tries to get rid of them, but then the work belatedly gets discovered by the art world. In both situations, it is Robinson’s lack of perspective that ironically makes him a valuable commodity, for a short while, but it all comes crashing down. 

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy was willing to nominate Double Indemnity the previous year, but this is a much grimier noir. The always-volatile Fritz Lang, meanwhile, was never a popular man, and received little acclaim when he moved from Germany to America for the (brilliant) middle period of his career. This is certainly a stretch to say this could have won. But The Lost Weekend is also a very dark film, so I just imagined that, in my alternate reality, the Academy got even darker.

Why It’s Great:

1. I’m just going to say, this may now be my favorite Fritz Lang movie. Better than Metropolis. Better than M. Better than The Big Heat. I’ll go even further: it may be my favorite film noir! I’ve always loved it but the restored version finally reveals how perfect it really is: The script is ingenious. The performances are heartbreaking. The directing is passionate. This movie interlocks plot and theme and symbolism and character with a microscopic level of clockwork precision.
2. Joan Bennett is certainly my all-time favorite femme fatale. In many ways, she’s the most pitiless and cruel lover to ever be depicted on the screen. (He begs to paint her portrait, but she forces him to get on his knees and paint her toenails instead, sneering “they’ll be masterpieces.”) But Bennett’s astounding performance grants her a deep pool of vulnerability and, against all odds, sympathy. Her love for her secret sleazebag boyfriend Duryea is so naïve, so overpowering, that the worse she treats Robinson, the more you pity her.
   
3. Lang was known for his imperiousness on set and many today dismiss his body of work as overly cruel, but that’s not true at all. Yes, he loved to subject his characters to the worst machinations of fate, but only to show that any degree of suffering or cruelty can be humanized and understood. They say that Bertrand Russell loved mankind but hated actual people. Lang was the opposite: He hated mankind but he could sympathize with every individual person.
   
4. Fictional movies about artists always have one huge problem: the art we see onscreen never matches the lofty things we hear people say about it. This time around, Lang, who collected many great painters before they were discovered, actually commissioned beautiful, richly modernistic work from a friend named John Decker. For once it’s nice to see a movie about a fictional artist in which people onscreen praise his work and you can actually agree.
   

Ah, 1945: I’ll just show a nice-looking ad for once...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1944

The Year: 1944

What the Nominees Were: (The number of nominees went back down to five and would stay there for another 66 years before finally expanding again in 2010.) Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Going My Way, Since You Went Away, Wilson
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Laura, another proto-noir, was easily one of the best of the year

What Did Win: Going My Way
How It’s Aged: It’s way too corny. I’ve always found Bing Crosby to be a bland leading man and this movie is no exception. Barry Fitzgerald is a great character actor, but he’s too broad for a big role like this one.

What Should’ve Won: Double Indemnity
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard, especially when I saw that Double Indemnity was one of the five nominees, proving that it wouldn’t have been that shocking for it to win (though I know that, in reality, it probably didn’t get that close, for reasons listed below)

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain
Stars: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson

The Story: Shady insurance salesman Walter Neff gets seduced into killing a customer’s husband, but then they get greedy and decide to collect double by using the titular clause. Neff’s friend at the insurance agency gets suspicious and investigates. The conspirators fall out and end up dead.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography Scoring and Sound, but won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: Film Noir was just being born in 1944 and the Academy was letting everyone know right away that they wanted none of it. The movie was too good not to nominate in all those categories, but it’s not surprising that it was totally shut out. When Leo McCarey was named Best Director for Going My Way, a bitter Wilder tripped him on his way to accept the award.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. When I first heard that French novelist Albert Camus (“The Stranger”) ranked Cain as one of his biggest influences, I wondered if he was pulling our leg, like later French directors insisting Jerry Lewis was America’s greatest director. But when I finally read Cain’s existentially bleak prose, I could see that he was indeed a direct ancestor of Camus’s style.
2. But we have two great noir novelists here, because Raymond Chandler co-writes the adaptation with Wilder. He does a great job adding more sparkle to Cain’s plain dialogue, but Wilder was so stunned by the horrors of Chandler’s alcoholism that he vowed to make a picture about that next. More on that next year…
3. Fred MacMurray had a good long career playing morally upright men (such as in “My Three Sons”) …with just two exceptions, both Billy Wilder movies, one near the beginning and one near the end of MacMurray’s career. Well, I’m going to pick both those movies, so you’re going to get a very skewed view of the man’s public image. He could not be more cynical here as an utterly amoral insurance man.
   
4. As the 40s began, top screenwriters Wilder, John Huston and Preston Sturges basically showed up arm-in-arm and demanded the right to direct their own scripts. The studio moguls weren’t at all sure that was a good idea, but the results were hard to argue with. Wilder’s first two movies are great, but it was with this film that he made it clear that the writer-director was here to stay …and so the true auteur was born.
5. Stanwyck is not really a naturally stunning woman, but nobody could act sexier, and she was on a tear with The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and this role. That anklet turned out to be the most incendiary wardrobe item from the peak Hollywood era.
   

Ah, 1944: Don’t be seduced by her facial soap!