This one is from our vaults, first published 8 years ago but we're reupping it it with some additional bits of trivia to celebrate March 19th! If it's your birthday today you can brag that you share a birthday with the televised tradition of Oscar ceremonies. This particular ceremony, the 25th Academy Awards, held 68 years ago today was historic for many reasons...
Shirley Booth in NYC accepts her Oscar while the LA crowd looks on
• First, and most importantly, it was he first televised Oscar ceremony ever. It was bi-coastal (which we hear they're trying again this year). Bob Hope entertained the crowd in LA while the great two time Best Actor winner Fredric March (one of the Academy's favourite men) worked the crowd in New York.
• Shirley Booth, who won for Come Back Little Sheba, fell on the steps to the stage! You can watch it here. Jennifer Lawrence didn't invent that little attention grabbing Best Actress move!
Booth (March 53) / Lawrence (February 13)
• Speaking of... Jennifer Lawrence is a typical best actress winner in that they like them young and beautiful and 20something and often when their careers are just beginning to blaze. Shirley Booth was a total anomaly for a long long time. She was the only 50something actress to ever win the top female prize until the Academy finally cried uncle with Julianne Moore for Still Alice (2014).
• The early '50s through the early 70s' was a good era for the Broadway stage since hits often transferred to the screen (instead of the other way around) and sometimes they even brought their Tony winning stage leads with them. It has happened 9 times all told but only twice in the Best Actress category (Anne Bancroft won ten years after Shirley for The Miracle Worker). It would have been thrice but Viola Davis opted to pretend she was supporting in Fences (2016) so she got a Supporting Actress Oscar for the role she won Best Lead Actress for on Broadway.
• 1952 was early enough in Oscar's history that silent film giants were still attending. Note that Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson were at the ceremony for Cecil B. DeMille's win for Best Picture!
• Best Actor winner Gary Cooper (High Noon) wasn't present so John Wayne accepted on his behalf with a tetchy fun speech which ended with him pretending murderous rage that he didn't get to play the High Noon role.
• Gloria Grahame gave what might be the shortest acceptance speech in the history of the Supporting Actress category for one of its briefest roles. (She's only onscreen for 10 minutes). She merely said "thank you very much" as she raced past the microphone!
• One of the most fascinating trivia items about this night is the distribution of the statues. Vincente Minnelli's amazing film The Bad and the Beautiful that we've written about a few times won the most Oscars. That's noteworthy because it's the most statues ever won by a film that wasn't up for Best Picture. It's also one of only two times that a non Best Picture nominee took the most Oscars (the first and only other film to do this was The Thief of Bagdad (1942). High Noon was in second place with 4 trophies but the Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth, to which history has not been kind, only took home two. For many decades The Greatest Show on Earth was the last Best Picture winner to win less than three Oscars but Spotlight (2015) finally changed that trivia note by scoring only two itself.
• It wasn't just in the number of trophies won by Best Picture nominees that this ceremony was notable but how the prizes divvied up. 1952 was an unusually scattered Oscar year. Get this: It is one of only four years in Academy history when Picture, Director and all four acting awards went to completely different films. The other years are 1956, 2005 and 2012... so by that pattern this won't happen again until after I'm dead *sniffle* in the 2070s when it will happen twice in short succession!
RJ Wagner & Terry Moore at the Oscars. RJ in With a Song...
• Terry Moore, Best Supporting Actress nominee that year for Come Back Little Sheba is one of only two Oscar nominated actors (that we're aware of) that were raised Mormon. The other is Amy Adams. The Mormonism factoid is hilarious since Moore excelled at playing "fast" girls onscreen (see also Peyton Place) and lived a fairly tabloid friendly life, marrying six times and eventually posing for Playboy. Moore brought Natalie Wood's future husband RJ Wagner as her date (he was in one of the nominated films With a Song in My Heart).
• Terry Moore is now 92 and she is the only surviving Oscar nominee from this ceremony. (Her date that night, RJ Wagner, is also still with us. He's 91.)
• Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, which had won the Honorary for Best Foreign Language Film at the previous ceremony (before international feature was a category) was nominated for Art Direction at this ceremony. It was the first competitive category nomination for any Asian film. Foreign films showing up at two consecutive Oscar ceremonies happened several times but Oscar finally put an end to this in the 1970s with a rule that's still in place. If you are nominated for Best International Feature in your submission year, you are ineligible for other categories thereafter. This is why some foreign features with high Oscar hopes actually release during the calendar year of their submission (even though that's not required for the foreign film category) so that they can compete in other categories, too.
• This was also the night where John Ford won his fourth Best Directing Oscar (for The Quiet Man). No one else has or probably ever will match that record though William Wyler surely looked like he might at the time since he was still going strong and won his third for Ben-Hur (1959) seven years later. But Wyler never won again despite making a few more pictures that Oscar was into (The Collector, Funny Girl, The Children's Hour).
• And one final fun note. The Toulouse-Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge was up for several Oscars but won only Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction losing everything else including Best Picture. The same exact fate awaited the musical Moulin Rouge! (2001) 49 years later.