The 1932 Oscars, the last November Ceremony

The 5th Academy Awards were held on this day (November 18th) in history, 86 long years ago. I bring this up because it's quite a year in Oscar history full of firsts (and lasts!) and cool trivia. Let's recap, shall we?

Wallace Beery (left) and Fredric March (right) tied for Best Actor

First & Last Times For...

A Best Picture winner with only one nomination!
The soapy and delicious all star ensemble pic Grand Hotel won despite no other nominations, a figure that's often been cited as a dubious achievement but isn't unthinkable with actual context; there were only 7 regular categories a film could be nominated in back then, unlike 17 today (the number of categories currently stands at 24 but the others are for foreign/animated/doc/shorts and, of course, a film cannot be nominated in both screenplay categories). And there were less nominees in the categories, too. This made nomination counts for Best Pictures much smaller (there weren't even supporting categories yet where Grand Hotel surely would have been nominated -- hellooooo one of Joan Crawford's best performances!). Here was how it shook out...

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Curio: Fotonovels

Alexa here.  Seeing Super 8 this holiday weekend left me with nostalgia for its template, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  And that brought to mind one of my favorite bits of 70s movie kitsch, Fotonovels. 

Fotonovels were "a collection of books that were filled from front to back with photos from a particular movie" and had "a shorter life than disco itself." Like comic books, but with real photographs! They were so exciting to me as a child. Grease was my favorite; before I even saw the movie I wore out my copy. I also loved Ice Castles (I was especially taken with the "Lexie" embroidered on her collar).  Recently, I scored a copy of the Close Encounters version. Here are some pictures of mine, as well as some I've spotted around the internet.

Click for The Champ and Ice Castles...

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