What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1950

The Year: 1950

What the Nominees Were: All About Eve, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines, Sunset Boulevard
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Huston’s noir The Asphalt Jungle is brilliant, and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is even better. American director Jules Dassin, exiled to Britain by the blacklist, turned out a great movie called Night and the City. Max Ophuls returned to France to make La Ronde.

What Did Win: All About Eve
How It’s Aged: Spectacularly. Just as witty as it was when Joseph Mankiewicz (Herman’s brother) wrote it and directed it, this is the ultimate exposé of backstage culture at its most venomous. But…

What Should’ve Won: Sunset Boulevard 

How Hard Was the Decision: A nearly impossible choice between All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place. I seriously considered declaring a three-way tie. But, ultimately, I needed to make a choice (I decided to allow myself only one tie, which will come many years later.) As great as the other two movies are, Sunset Boulevard is the most iconic of the three. We quote it more often and the images are burned more indelibly onto our brains.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr. (Wilder and Brackett’s bridge partner who suggested they give a faded screen star a young lover, so they shared credit, and an Oscar, with him)
Stars: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson

The Story: Washed-up screenwriter Joe Gillis, on the run from repo men, hides out at the crumbling mansion of ex-silent-screen-star Norma Desmond, helping her write a terrible screenplay about Salome. He discovers that her butler Max von Mayerling is actually her ex-husband. She pitches Salome to Cecil B. DeMille, but he turns her down. Norma falls in love with Joe, but he sneaks out to work on a new screenplay with young studio reader Betty Schaefer. Norma finally shoots Joe dead. DeMille has to come coax Norma into turning herself in by saying “We’re ready for your close-up.”

Any Nominations or Wins: 11 nominations! It lost Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography and Editing. It won “Story and Screenplay”, black and white Art Direction, and Score.
Why It Didn’t Win: Both this and the winner made the acting community look pretty bad, but All About Eve was about Broadway, whereas this hit a little closer to home for the Academy. Louis B. Mayer said to Billy Wilder, “You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood,” and Mayer still had a lot of swing at the academy (but would be fired from MGM shortly after the awards, ending an era.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Gloria Swanson was not their first choice, but other fading silent stars, like Mary Pickford, weren’t willing to be portrayed like this. Swanson relished the part of a long-past-faded silent queen turned into a deluded nightmare. She burns up the screen and steals the movie. And of course bringing her in brought in the delicious prospect of bringing in footage of her movie Queen Kelly, directed by the man playing her butler (and, as it turns out, former director) in the movie.
   
2. The cameos of Hollywood greats playing themselves are legendary (Buster Keaton, Gale Sonegard, Warner Baxter), but none are more fascinating than Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille and Wilder were on opposite sides of the biggest feud at the time, whether ex-communists should be purged from the Director’s Guild (DeMille was leading the purge and Wilder opposed it) but DeMille still gamely played along with Wilder, personifying the studio system as a genial but ultimately heartless institution, that wrings all the value they can out of stars like Desmond and ditches them once the wrinkles appear.
   
3. Like James Cameron would be later, Billy Wilder was a great scene-writer but an even better scene deleter. The alternate beginning, where Joe’s corpse sits up in the morgue and narrates this tale to the other corpses, would have been terrible.
4. Most great stories begin with a public humiliation, and there’s no better way to do that than to have someone overhear something they weren’t supposed to hear (which requires less melodrama than having someone intentionally humiliate them.) When Joe hears Betty’s negative coverage of his script, then belatedly introduces himself, they’re both equally mortified. But Joe has gotten something valuable: He’s the first screenwriter to ever get completely honest feedback from a studio.
   
   
   
5. They say you should always write what you know. In this case, Wilder took that to an extreme. Not only had he been a Hollywood screenwriter, he had also been a gigolo in 1930s Vienna!
6. Is there any better example of an ironic fulfillment of a hero’s desire? Joe says that what he always wanted out of his Hollywood career was a pool. He gets it…
   

Ah, 1950: Madison Avenue understood what women wanted…