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1945
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1945
Actor:
RAY MILLAND in "The Lost Weekend",
Bing Crosby in "The Bells of St. Mary's", Gene Kelly
in "Anchors Aweigh", Gregory Peck in
"The Keys of the Kingdom", Cornel Wilde in "A
Song to Remember"
Actress:
JOAN CRAWFORD in "Mildred Pierce",
Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells of St. Mary's", Greer
Garson in "The Valley of Decision", Jennifer Jones
in "Love Letters", Gene Tierney in "Leave
Her to Heaven"
Supporting Actor:
JAMES DUNN in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", Michael Chekhov
in "Spellbound", John Dall in "The Corn Is Green",
Robert Mitchum in "The Story of G.I. Joe", J. Carrol
Naish in "A Medal for Benny"
Supporting Actress:
ANNE REVERE in "National Velvet", Eve Arden in "Mildred
Pierce", Ann Blyth in "Mildred
Pierce", Angela Lansbury in "The Picture of Dorian
Gray", Joan Lorring in "The Corn Is Green"
Director:
BILLY WILDER for "The Lost Weekend",
Clarence Brown for "National Velvet", Alfred Hitchcock
for "Spellbound", Leo McCarey for "The Bells of
St. Mary's", Jean Renoir for "The Southerner"
 Now
that World War II was over and a more optimistic mood swept
across the country, glamour returned to the awards ceremony.
But the Best Picture award was presented to producer/director/co-writer
Billy Wilder's four-Oscar winning, socially-significant The
Lost Weekend, a grim, realistic, downbeat drama based
on Charles Jackson's best-selling novel and the first major
Hollywood film to deal with the subject of alcoholism in a
serious tone. Some consider Wilder's humiliation the previous
year with his seven-time nominated film Double
Indemnity (1944) (with no wins) was one of the main
factors for his tremendous win this year. This time, Wilder's
Best Picture film won four of its seven nominations. This was
also the first time that the Best Picture Oscar winner
also won the prestigious top prize (known as the Grand Prix)
at the Cannes Film Festival.
[The Best Picture winner in 1945 set a pattern
for more adult, socially-responsible Best Picture winners in
the 40's. Serious "social issues" films would win
the Best Picture award in four of the next five years: e.g., The
Lost Weekend (1945), The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Gentleman's Agreement
(1947), and All the King's Men (1949).]
The meaningful film, from Charles Jackson's adapted
novel, won four major awards - Best Picture, Best Director,
Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. Director Wilder won Oscars
for Best Director and Best Screenplay (shared with Charles
Brackett). Brackett and Wilder were producers-directors of
the previous year's Double
Indemnity (1944). They would collaborate together in
the future with A Foreign Affair (1948) and Sunset
Boulevard (1950).
The Best Picture winner defeated the following
four Best Picture nominees:
- the classic film noir melodrama by director
Michael Curtiz, Mildred Pierce (with
six nominations and one win - Best Actress)
- MGM's lively musical directed by George Sidney, Anchors
Aweigh (with five nominations and one win - Best Musical
Picture Score) - notable for an animated mouse named Jerry,
from the "Tom and Jerry" cartoon, in a dance
sequence with star Gene Kelly
- director Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller
with psychoanalytic content about an amnesia victim and a
Freudian psychologist, Spellbound (with six nominations
and one win - Best Dramatic Score)
- Leo McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's (with
eight nominations and one win - Best Sound Recording), the
sequel to the previous year's award-winning Going My Way
(1944). This time, the film told the story of an easy-going
priest who battles with the Mother Superior of parochial
St. Mary's School.
[Note: The Bells of St. Mary's was the first sequel
to be nominated for Best Picture. Other sequels later nominated
for Best Picture included The
Godfather, Part II (1974) - a winner, and The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - a loser,
with another installment: The
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) -
a winner. The Bells of St. Mary's lost in four major
awards categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Bing Crosby),
Best Actress (Ingrid Bergman), and Best Director (Leo McCarey)
- all four were honored winners from the previous year!]
Two directors of the five Best Picture-nominated
films were not nominated as Best Director: George Sidney for Anchors
Aweigh, and Michael Curtiz for Mildred
Pierce. They were replaced with the following two directors:
- French director Jean Renoir (with his sole
nomination) was nominated as Best Director for The Southerner (with
three nominations and no wins), his most respected American
film about the hardships of a Texas farmer who struggles
to support himself as a Southern cottonfield sharecropper
- Clarence Brown (with his fifth of six career
nominations) was nominated as Best Director for National
Velvet (with five nominations and two wins - Best Supporting
Actress and Best Film Editing)
Debonair Wales-born Ray Milland (with his sole
career nomination and Oscar win) won the Best Actor award for
his stark portrayal of whiskey-soaked, boozing Don Birnam with
writer's block on a five-day binge in the year's Best Picture
winner The Lost Weekend. It
was an about-face role for the lightweight comedy and romantic
actor for over a decade, with Milland using increasingly desperate
measures to obtain a drink, and eventually ending up hallucinating
(with delirium tremens) in a hospital. Milland continued acting
for many years, including starring as Ryan O'Neal's father
in Love Story (1970). [Other
alcoholic roles that have earned Oscar nominations include:
James Mason in A
Star Is Born (1954), Bing Crosby in The Country
Girl (1954), Susan Hayward in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955),
and Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses (1963).]
The other Best Actor nominees included:
- Bing Crosby (with his second nomination) reprising
his role as Father O'Malley in the sequel The Bells of
St. Mary's. Crosby was the first actor to be twice-nominated
for playing the same role in two different films.
[Others who have the same distinction include Peter O'Toole
- as King Henry II in Becket (1964) and The Lion
in Winter (1968), Al Pacino - as Michael Corleone in The
Godfather (1972) and The
Godfather, Part II (1974), and Paul Newman - as Fast
Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) and The
Color of Money (1986).]
- Gene Kelly (with his sole unsuccessful career
nomination) as carefree, dancing sailor Joseph Brady on shore
leave in Hollywood in director George Sidney's Anchors
Aweigh (with five nominations and one win - Best Musical
Score) - it was Kelly's first big hit with MGM following
his debut film For Me and My Gal (1942) and Cover
Girl (1944). [Kelly wasn't even nominated for possibly
his best performance ever on film in Singin'
In The Rain (1952). Kelly did receive an Honorary
Oscar in 1951.]
- Gregory Peck (with his first of four unsuccessful
nominations in five years - his fifth and final nomination
was a winner in 1962) was nominated for his role as young
Scottish missionary Father Francis Chisholm in 19th century
China in director John Stahl's The Keys of the Kingdom (with
four nominations and no wins). [Gregory Peck became a star
after appearing in three films in 1945: Spellbound, The
Valley of Decision, and The Keys of the Kingdom -
his second film.]
- Cornel Wilde (with his sole career nomination)
was nominated for his role as pianist/composer Frederic Chopin
in the biopic A Song to Remember (with six nominations
and no wins).
The biggest winner of the awards ceremony in
1945 was longtime 20s-30s star Joan Crawford in a triumphant
return to the spotlight for her Best Actress-winning performance
in Michael Curtiz' melodramatic 'women's picture' Mildred
Pierce. It was Crawford's sole career Oscar
for her portrayal of a hardworking, sacrificial, middle-class
mother figure (the title role) who found business success with
a restaurant but personal tragedy with her spoiled daughter
in the James M. Cain story of murder, larceny, blackmail and
adultery. [She would be nominated (though not the winner) two
more times, for Possessed (1947) and Sudden Fear
(1952).]
The other Best Actress nominees included:
- Ingrid Bergman (with her third nomination)
as Mother Superior Sister Benedict in The Bells of St.
Mary's
- Greer Garson (with her sixth nomination) as
poor Pittsburgh housemaid Mary Rafferty (who falls in love
with wealthy coal mine owner Gregory Peck) in director Tay
Garnett's melodramatic The Valley of Decision (with
two nominations and no wins)
- Jennifer Jones (with the third of four consecutive
nominations in a career total of five) as amnesiac Victoria
- who falls for the love letters written by an imposter in
director William Dieterle's melodrama, Love Letters (with
four nominations and no wins)
- Gene Tierney (with her sole career nomination)
as beautiful neurotic Ellen Berent - a pathologically possessive
and jealous woman in director John Stahl's soap-operish Leave
Her to Heaven (with four nominations and one win - Best
Color Cinematography)
The Best Supporting Actor award was won by Irish
actor James Dunn (with his sole nomination) as alcoholic father
and waiter Johnny Nolan whose drinking habits frustrate his
attempts to support his family in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn about
turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement life, the debut
feature film of future Oscar winning director Elia Kazan. [Kazan
would be nominated for five career awards, winning twice for Gentleman's
Agreement (1947) and On
The Waterfront (1954).]
The other Best Supporting Actor nominees included:
- Michael Chekhov (with his sole career nomination)
as threatened psychiatrist Dr. Alex Brulow (and Ingrid Bergman's
mentor) in Spellbound
- John Dall (with his sole career nomination
for his film debut) as Welsh mining boy Morgan Evans (taught
by spinster schoolteacher Bette Davis) in director Irving
Rapper's The Corn is Green (with two nominations and
no wins)
- Robert Mitchum (with his sole career nomination!)
as infantry commander Lieutenant Walker in the Italian campaign
in WWII in director William Wellman's The Story of G.
I. Joe (with four nominations and no wins)
- J. Carrol Naish (with his second and last
career nomination) as Charley Martin - a war hero's father
in director Irving Pichel's A Medal for Benny (with
two nominations and no wins)
The winner in the Best Supporting Actress category
was Anne Revere (with her second of three career nominations
- and sole Oscar win) for her role as Elizabeth Taylor's supportive,
strong-faced mother Mrs. Brown, who helps her daughter train
for the Grand National race in director Clarence Brown's National
Velvet (with five nominations and two wins - Best Supporting
Actress and Best Film Editing).
The other Best Supporting Actress nominees included
two co-stars:
- Eve Arden (with her sole unsuccessful career
nomination) as Mildred's knowing, wise-cracking, sidekick
friend Ida in Mildred Pierce
- Ann Blyth (with her sole unsuccessful career
nomination) as the bitchy, spoiled daughter Veda Pierce in Mildred
Pierce
- Angela Lansbury (with her second of three
unsuccessful career nominations) as innocent music-hall singer
Sibyl Vane in writer/director Albert Lewin's adaptation of
Oscar Wilde's classic novel titled The Picture of Dorian
Gray (with three nominations and one win - Best B/W Cinematography)
- Joan Lorring (with her sole unsuccessful career
nomination) as young seductress Bessie Watty in The Corn
is Green
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
There were many serious omissions and problems
with this year's awards. Why was Anchors Aweigh given
a Best Picture nomination and four other nominations, when
Edgar Ulmer's noir classic Detour was unrecognized?
Another noir film was also un-nominated: Robert Siodmak's The
Suspect. Edward G. Robinson and co-star Joan Bennett were
un-nominated in two Fritz Lang noir films: The Woman
in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street.
Boris Karloff (never nominated for an Oscar in
his entire career) was ignored in Val Lewton's superb B movie
horror classic The Body Snatcher. Elia Kazan's feature
directing debut film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was denied
Best Director and Best Picture nominations, and a Best Supporting
Actress nomination for Joan Blondell. John Ford's They Were
Expendable also received only two minor nominations - the
film's major star John Wayne was un-nominated.
Vincente Minnelli's and MGM's romantic drama The
Clock received no nominations - it told about Alice Mayberry
(Judy Garland in her first non-singing role), an all-American
single working girl, and young soldier Corp. Joe Allen (Robert
Walker) on two-day leave in New York. They happened to meet
in Penn Station, fell in love, and hastily committed to marriage
-- and because time ran out -- had the ceremony in a diner.
Likewise, Michael Curtiz' multi-generational domestic epic Roughly
Speaking was also devoid of nominations, particularly
for Rosalind Russell's portrayal of real-life Louise Randall
Pierson (the film's scriptwriter, based on her autobiographical
novel), a strong persevering woman who endured numerous setbacks
including two marriages, the Depression, polio and four children.
It was a role that Bette Davis reportedly turned down.
And Robert Mitchum, who lost his sole Oscar nomination
in 1945 for a minor role in The Story of G.I. Joe, wasn't
even nominated for his better and greater roles for the rest
of his film career, in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Out
Of The Past (1947), Crossfire (1947), The
Night of the Hunter (1955), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
(1957), The Sundowners (1960), and Cape Fear
(1962).
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