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One of the enduring traditions of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for best picture almost invariably goes to a film that isn't. This will not be news to anyone who has sat through some genuine groaners from Oscars past: pictures like Frank Lloyd's 1933 “Cavalcade,” Robert Z. Leonard's 1936 “Great Ziegfeld” and Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 “Greatest Show on Earth.”
But even when good movies win, the other nominees are usually of equal or even greater interest. Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford's magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” (a more modest, defensible claim and perhaps one the academy should revive) while Orson Welles' game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.
If the Oscars aren't a reliable guide to artistic accomplishment, they provide an infallible index to how the leaders of the motion picture industry want their business to be seen in any given year. In 1933, for example, pressure was mounting from civic and religious groups for Hollywood to clean up its act - pressure that would result in the renewed enforcement of the Production Code in 1934.
By selecting “Cavalcade” - a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noel Coward play - the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office. Among the other nominees of the 1932-33 season: the flesh-baring backstage musical “42nd Street”; Mae West's “She Done Him Wrong”; and Frank Borzage's adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's “Farewell to Arms,” a film so forthright in its depiction of premarital sex that 12 minutes had to be cut when it was reissued into the more prudish, post-Code world of 1938.
For most of the 1930s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (”It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (”Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences.
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The victory of the hugely popular “Gone With the Wind” (1939) may have been historically inevitable, but it came at the expense of several movies more accomplished though less explicitly edifying. The nominees for that year included superior genre films like Leo McCarey's melodrama “Love Affair” and Ford's western “Stagecoach,” as well as a pair of overtly political dramas - Frank Capra's “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and the controversial John Steinbeck adaptation, “Of Mice and Men.” The balance of the nominees from 1939 consisted of safe literary adaptations: “Dark Victory,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wuthering Heights.”
There was nothing better than a book or a Broadway play when it came to cloaking Hollywood in respectability. During World War II priorities shifted from moral development to patriotic fervor. The “outstanding motion picture” of 1942 was determined to be William Wyler's portrait of a middle-class British couple enduring the Blitz, “Mrs. Miniver,” while the other nominees included three films urging, overtly or by suggestion, American intervention in the European war: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's “Invaders,” Irving Pichel's “Pied Piper” and Michael Curtiz's “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Little wonder, then, that Welles's follow-up to “Citizen Kane,” the piercingly nostalgic “Magnificent Ambersons,” went home empty-handed; this was not a moment for bitter self-reflection.
After the war a second generation moved into managing the Hollywood studios, members of a pampered, college-educated elite that had experienced little of the social anxiety of their parents. They found it less important to flaunt their cultural credentials than to reform the world they had inherited. Hence the rise of the social problem film, spearheaded by the best picture wins of Billy Wilder's “Lost Weekend” (alcoholism, 1945), Wyler's “Best Years of Our Lives” (returning war veterans, 1946) and Elia Kazan's “Gentleman's Agreement” (anti-Semitism, 1947), augmented by nominations for Edward Dmytryk's “Crossfire” (anti-Semitism among returning war veterans, 1947) and Anatole Litvak's “Snake Pit” (inhumane treatment of mental patients, 1948). Within a few years many writers and directors of these films would find themselves receiving not Oscar nominations but summonses to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
By the 1950s Hollywood again found itself under attack - not by censors but by television, which lured substantial numbers of viewers away from movie theaters. The message sent by the Oscar nominations became a simple one: We are not TV. For a while social problem films continued to dominate the best film winners (”From Here to Eternity,” 1953; “On the Waterfront,” 1954; “Marty,” 1955), but increasingly the other nominees were devoted to historical or touristic spectacle, filmed in color, wide screen and stereophonic sound - like “The Robe” (1953) and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955), which promised a sweep and scale that home viewing could not provide.