Grabbing Oscar.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Academy Awards

WITH THE ACADEMY AWARDS fast approaching, a proverbial water cooler question always is, "Did the fight person win?" It hardly is news that the names called often are based upon things besides the actual performance. Several potential factors sometimes come into play. First, insiders frequently feel an actor won because an earlier nominated role by said thespian was neglected. Most recently, this was the thinking on Colin Firth's Best Actor nod for "The King's Speech" (2010). Though a moving performance, even he felt his best acting had occurred in his Oscar nominated role as the mourning gay professor of "A Single Man" (2009).

However, the prime example along these lines concerns Jimmy Stewart's Best Actor statuette for "The Philadelphia Story" (1940). He is channing as the frustrated novelist forced into coveting a society wedding, but filmland's take on the subject suggests it was more about Stewart not winning the previous year in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939). This was Hollywood's year of years, and the other nominees included Clark Gable in "Gone With the Wind," Laurence Olivier in "Wuthering Heights," Mickey Rooney (America's top box office star that year) in "Babes in Arms," and the ultimate winner, Robert Donat, in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips." Today, it seems amazing that neither Gable nor Stewart won. Yet, in that era, major studios strongly could encourage how their guild members voted. "Chips" was produced by the British division of MGM at Denham (England) studios, and all-powerful MGM (with "more stars than the heavens") felt "Chips" would do more domestic business with an Oscar and acted (mad, pressured) accordingly. MGM also had produced "Babes in Arms" and distributed "Gone With the Wind," but there were no concerns about audiences turning out for either picture.

A second subtextual reason for possibly winning is what might be called career neglect, such as an aging John Wayne's Oscar for "True Grit" (1969), when today it seems surprising that the star of another Western sounding picture that year did not win--Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy." Still, my favorite example of a prolonged neglect winner is Al Pacino coming up short seven times before finally taking home the gold for his brash, blind, hard-drinking ex-Army colonel in "Scent of a Women" (1992). When fellow nominee Denzel Washington ("Malcolm X") later appeared on a talk show and the host attempted to bait him into commenting on Pacino's win being a "career...