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1952
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
GARY COOPER in  "High
Noon", Marlon Brando in "Viva Zapata!", Kirk
Douglas in "The Bad and the Beautiful",
Jose Ferrer in "Moulin Rouge", Alec Guinness in "The
Lavender Hill Mob"
Actress:
SHIRLEY BOOTH in "Come Back, Little Sheba", Joan Crawford
in "Sudden Fear", Bette Davis in "The Star",
Julie Harris in "The Member of the Wedding", Susan
Hayward in "With a Song in My Heart"
Supporting Actor:
ANTHONY QUINN in "Viva Zapata!", Richard Burton in "My
Cousin Rachel", Arthur Hunnicutt in "The Big Sky",
Victor McLaglen in "The
Quiet Man", Jack Palance in "Sudden Fear"
Supporting Actress:
GLORIA GRAHAME in "The Bad and the Beautiful",
Jean Hagen in "Singin'
In The Rain", Colette Marchand in "Moulin Rouge",
Terry Moore in "Come Back, Little Sheba", Thelma RItter
in "With a Song in My Heart"
Director:
JOHN FORD for "The
Quiet Man", Cecil B. DeMille for "The Greatest
Show On Earth", John Huston for "Moulin Rouge",
Joseph L. Mankiewicz for "Five Fingers", Fred Zinnemann
for "High
Noon"
 This
was the first year that the Academy Awards ceremony
were televised (on March 19, 1953), on black and white NBC-TV,
with Bob Hope as host (in Hollywood at the RKO Pantages Theater)
and Conrad Nagel (in New York at the NBC International Theatre).
It was the first ceremony to be held simultaneously in two
locations. It resulted in the largest audience in commercial
television history. Hollywood had to admit and succumb to the
competing pressures from the burgeoning home entertainment
medium. The show was telecast throughout the US and Canada.
The Best Picture Award was another surprise and
is forever considered one of the Academy's worst choices for
the top prize. 1952 has been considered one of the years in
which the Academy blundered the greatest in its choice of Best
Picture. The bloated, lumbering, melodramatic epic The Greatest
Show on Earth was one of the Academy's biggest gaffes.
This year also marked the first time in
Oscar's history that all of the top six prizes (Best Picture,
Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting
Actress) went to six different films. This would occur again
in 1956, and then 49 years later in 2005.
Instead of going to the favored, critically-acclaimed,
definitive and popular western High
Noon, the top Oscar - in a major upset - went
to the "P.T. Barnum of Hollywood," legendary director/producer
Cecil B. De Mille's gaudy epic spectacular about the struggling
Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus, The Greatest
Show on Earth (with five nominations and two wins - Best
Picture and Best Writing: Original Story). De Mille's cornball
film chronicled the financial and personal problems (a romantic
triangle) of the tough, three-ring circus manager (Charlton
Heston in one of his earliest films), a beautiful, high-bar
aerialist (Betty Hutton), a crippled trapeze artist/performer
(Cornel Wilde), a clown (James Stewart), and others. This ponderous
Best Picture is best known not for its acting (even though
it was nominated and won for Best Original Story!) but for
its spectacular train-wreck sequence.
The award, more than honoring the film, also
saluted the film's producer, DeMille "the father (or founder)
of Hollywood," with his only Best Picture Oscar
- and his sole Best Director nomination. [Apologetically, in
recognition of his outstanding years of producing and directing,
De Mille received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award instead.]
He was known for making the first feature-length movie in Hollywood, The
Squaw Man (1914), and many other larger than life, 'cast
of thousands' films in his past (including The Ten Commandments
(1923), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Cleopatra
(1934), Samson and Delilah (1949), and a second
version of The Ten Commandments (1956),
his last film). His The Greatest Show on Earth was one
of the first Best Pictures that was a big-budget blockbuster
with lots of special effects. The Academy felt obligated, presumably,
to honor the great director as his career was coming to an
end.
The four other Best Picture nominees were diverse:
- the front-runner - the taut, gripping Western
showdown about a Hadleyville town marshal who faces four
professional killers in director Fred Zinnemann's character
study High
Noon (with six nominations and four wins - Best Actor,
Best Song - Dimitri Tiomkin's "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh
My Darlin'", Best Dramatic Score, and Best Film Editing).
The Academy followed its familiar pattern of snubbing western
genre films by denying the Best Picture Oscar to a western.
[Very few westerns have ever been nominated for Best Picture.
By century's end, only three have won the top award, Cimarron
(1930/31), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Unforgiven
(1992).]
- the portrait of the life of dwarfish, impressionistic
artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in director John Huston's Moulin
Rouge (with seven nominations and two wins - Best Color
Art Direction and Set Decoration, and Best Color Costume
Design)
- Sir Walter Scott's chivalrous romance novel
lavishly adapted for the screen in director Richard Thorpe's Ivanhoe (with
three nominations and no wins)
- John Ford's Irish romantic comedy The
Quiet Man (with seven nominations and two wins
- Best Director and Best Color Cinematography) about
an American ex-boxer (John Wayne) who returns to his
childhood Irish town of Innisfree and attempts to romance
a spirited Irish lass (Maureen O'Hara)
It was his sixth nomination for which John
Ford won his fourth Academy Award as Best Director
for his epic romantic comedy The
Quiet Man (1952). It was a record for the director
(and for Academy history - the most Best Director wins for
a film director), but it would be his last nomination
and Oscar. [Note: His earlier three Best Director wins were
in 1935, 1940, and 1941. Ford lost the Best Director award
for Stagecoach
(1939) and the Best Picture award for The Long
Voyage Home (1940). After his last win in 1952, he went
on to direct more great western classics, including The
Searchers (1956) and The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Remarkably,
John Ford never won an Oscar
for his Westerns, the major core of his work.] DeMille was
only nominated for director once - for this 1952-winning Best
Picture, but he lost. [His films were nominated for Best Picture
two other times - Cleopatra (1934) and The
Ten Commandments (1956).]
Although it was defeated for the Best Picture
award (with Stanley Kramer as producer), UA's High
Noon managed to bring an Oscar statuette to mythic,
small-town, retired Marshal Will Kane, played by fifty-one
year-old Gary Cooper (it was his fifth and last career nomination
- and his second Oscar win).
Marlon Brando again lost the Academy Award for
Best Actor (a second consecutive nomination in a career total
of eight nominations) in his title role performance as the
Mexican peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in director Elia
Kazan's Viva Zapata! (with five nominations and one
win - Best Supporting Actor). [Brando had a third consecutive
nomination in 1953 for Julius Caesar, and finally a
winning nomination in 1954 for On
The Waterfront (1954).]
Kirk Douglas (with his second of three unsuccessful
career nominations) was also Best Actor-nominated for his role
as Jonathan Shields, a ruthless Hollywood film producer in
director Vincente Minnelli's The Bad
and the Beautiful (with six nominations and five wins)
told from the viewpoint of an actress, a writer, and a director.
Douglas' nomination was the only one that the film didn't win.
[Kirk Douglas' impressive acting career was nominated only
three times - the other two were Champion (1949), and Lust
for Life (1956), but he never won an Oscar.]
The other two Best Actor nominees were:
- Jose Ferrer (with his third and last career
nomination - and his second Best Actor nomination) as the
physically stunted, cynical artist of 19th century Montmartre
named Toulouse-Lautrec in writer/director John Huston's Moulin
Rouge
- British actor Alec Guinness (with his first
of four career acting nominations) as unsuspected, prim bank
teller/mastermind robber Henry Holland who melts down gold
bank bars into miniature Eiffel Tower paperweights in director
Charles Crichton's UK comedy film The Lavender Hill Mob (with
two nominations and one win - Best Story and Screenplay)
The Best Actress Award winner was Shirley Booth
in her film debut (with her sole career nomination - and her only Oscar
for a role she had played on Broadway) as the sloppy, waddling,
worn-out, drab housewife Lola Delaney (of former alcoholic,
middle-aged, frustrated, and weak-resolved husband Burt Lancaster)
who mourns her lost dog Sheba in director Daniel Mann's film
of marital tension from William Inge's Come Back, Little
Sheba (with three nominations and one win - Best Actress).
[Booth's win marked the first time that an actress had
ever won a Best Actress award in her first film.] It was the
peak of Booth's acting career - she would appear in only four
more lesser feature films, achieving more popularity in the
title role on the TV comedy show Hazel in the early
60s.
The four other Best Actress nominees were:
- Joan Crawford (with her third and last career
nomination) as successful playwright/heiress Myra Hudson
in director David Miller's suspense thriller Sudden Fear (with
four nominations and no wins)
- Julie Harris (with her sole career nomination)
recreating her Broadway role as twelve year-old Frankie Adams
growing up in 1945 Georgia in director Fred Zinnemann's version
of Carson McCullers' play, The Member of the Wedding (the
film's sole nomination)
- Bette Davis (with her ninth career nomination)
as former Oscar-winning actress Margaret Elliot in pathetic
decline in director Stuart Heisler's The Star (the
film's sole nomination)
- Susan Hayward (with her fourth of five career
nominations) as Jane Froman (the real-life Froman provided
the actual singing in the film) in director Walter Lang's With
a Song in My Heart (with five nominations and one win
- Best Musical Score) about a crippled WWII troop singer/entertainer
who survived an airplane-crash during a USO tour; songs included "Get
Happy"
Mexican-born Anthony Quinn (with his first of
four career nominations - and first of two Best Supporting
Oscars) won the Best Supporting Actor Award for his performance
as Eufemio Zapata, Mexican revolutionary Zapata's (Marlon Brando)
dissolute, betraying brother in Viva Zapata!.
Other Best Supporting Actor nominees were:
- Jack Palance as a charming but lethal actor
Lester Blaine who romances Joan Crawford for her money in Sudden
Fear. [It was the first of three career nominations
for Palance. He was also nominated for playing a mean gunslinger
in Shane
(1953) and won for City Slickers (1991), a
record 38 years later.]
- Richard Burton in his American film debut
(with his first of seven unsuccessful nominations ) as young
aristocrat Philip Ashley obsessed with widowed Olivia de
Havilland in director Henry Koster's melodramatic My Cousin
Rachel (with four nominations and no wins)
- Arthur Hunnicutt (with his sole career nomination)
as 1830 Missouri keelboater Uncle Zeb in director Howard
Hawks' The Big Sky (with two nominations and no wins)
- Victor McLaglen (with his second and last
career nomination) for his role as bully Red Will Danaher
(Maureen O'Hara's brother) in The
Quiet Man. [McLaglen was the first winner
in the Best Actor category (in 1935) that was later nominated
in a Best Supporting Actor category.]
Gloria Grahame won the Best Supporting Actress
Award (with her last career nomination and her sole Oscar
win out of two career nominations) as Rosemary Bartlow - the
strong-willed, seductive Southern belle wife of an abused novelist-screenwriter
(Dick Powell) and an aspiring actress (molded by movie producer
Kirk Douglas) in The Bad and the Beautiful -
Grahame's first Oscar nomination was for Crossfire
(1947). [She also had a role in this year's Best Picture,
as the character of Angel.]
The other Best Supporting Actress nominees were:
- Jean Hagen (with her sole career nomination)
as blonde, squeaky-voiced, silent-turned-'talkie' film star
Lina Lamont in the great film musical Singin'
In The Rain - a stellar performance that should have
won the Oscar!
- Colette Marchand (with her sole nomination)
as streetwalker Marie Charlet (Toulouse-Lautrec's mistress)
in Moulin Rouge
- Terry Moore (with her sole nomination) as
room-renting student Marie Buckholder in Come Back, Little
Sheba
- Thelma Ritter (with her third of six unsuccessful
career nominations) as nurse Clancy (for crippled Susan Hayward)
in With a Song in My Heart
This year's recipients of Honorary and Other
Special Awards included producer/director Merian C. Cooper
("for his many innovations and contributions to the art
of motion pictures"), noted for King
Kong (1933), and silent era comedian Harold
Lloyd ("master comedian and good citizen"), best
known for Safety Last (1923) and The
Freshman (1925).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
It was a remarkable year for awards mistakes
and films that should have been nominated, but weren't. For
instance, what about two major MGM classics:
- the top backstage musical by co-directors
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Singin'
In The Rain, which only received two nominations
(for Best Supporting Actress (Jean Hagen) and Best Musical
Score (for Lennie Hayton)) - and no awards! (A Best Musical
Score award was taken away by perennial Oscar winner Alfred
Newman for the competing With a Song in My Heart.)
And where were nominations for Gene Kelly in his signature
film (as silent film star Don Lockwood, with his memorable
splashing in the rain segment), Debbie Reynolds (as Kelly's
love-interest), or the inimitable Donald O'Connor? And why
did Jean Hagen's vibrant performance lose? By contrast, in
the previous year, MGM's An
American in Paris (1951) received critical acclaim,
commercial success and six Oscars, with star and choreographer
Gene Kelly receiving an Honorary Award
- and the melodramatic Hollywood satire, MGM's The
Bad and the Beautiful which won a record five
Oscars (Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing: Screenplay,
Best Black and White Cinematography, Best Black and White
Art/Set Direction, and Best Black and White Costume Design)
was also not nominated for Best Picture. [The
film received the most Oscar wins of any film without
receiving a Best Picture nomination. It was supplanted
by the very inferior Best Picture nominee by MGM, Ivanhoe,
with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Joan Fontaine.]
Two great Alec Guinness British comedies, The
Man in the White Suit and The Lavender Hill Mob,
were also un-nominated for Best Picture. [The Lavender
Hill Mob, a film about a clever bank heist orchestrated
by a timid bank clerk, did bring, however, a Best
Actor nomination to Alec Guinness, and the film won the Best
Writing (Story and Screenplay) Award.]
Also lacking were nominations in all (or nearly
all) categories for Fritz Lang's third western Rancho Notorious,
with Marlene Dietrich, and for George Cukor's romantic comedy Pat
and Mike (with only one nomination for Best Original Screenplay
for Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin) with Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy.
Lovely, young 23 year-old blonde actress Grace
Kelly in her second screen role was not nominated for
playing the pacifist Quaker wife of Best Actor-winning Gary
Cooper in High
Noon. And Jennifer Jones was unrecognized as a white-trash
Carolina swamp girl in King Vidor's un-nominated film Ruby
Gentry. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers did not receive acting
nominations for their roles as husband and wife in Howard Hawks'
un-nominated screwball comedy Monkey Business.
The two main performers in John Ford's Irish
film The
Quiet Man (with seven nominations including Best Picture
and Best Supporting Actor (Victor McLaglen), and two wins as
noted above) should have been nominated, but were snubbed:
- John Wayne, in one of the finest roles of
his career, as American ex-boxer Sean Thornton
- red-haired Maureen O'Hara (who never received
a nomination!) as the fiesty, temperamental and spirited
Mary Kate Danaher
And the previous year's Best Actress Oscar winner
Judy Holliday was denied a nomination for her role as Florence
Keefer in George Cukor's comedy-drama about a troubled marriage, The
Marrying Kind (with no nominations), which reunited her
with the director and scriptwriters Gordon and Kanin (who had
both contributed to her 1950 Oscar win in Born Yesterday).
Charles Chaplin was un-nominated as Best Actor
in his last important film Limelight (1952), although
he was co-awarded the film's sole Oscar nomination and win
- for Best Original Dramatic Score 20 years into the future
in 1972, when the film finally became eligible for Oscar consideration.
It was Chaplin's ONLY competitive Academy Award win.
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