Oscars of 1937

Top praise in the cinema industry are the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. At the Academy's Annual Banquet last week, where some 1,200 guests included practically every real and fake celebrity in the business, the Academy bestowed its most publicized prize--that for the best U. S. performance of the year by an actress--upon a young woman who a year and a half ago was unknown in the U. S. and had never appeared in the cinema anywhere. She was MGM's Luise Rainer. The role for which she was rewarded--Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld--was the second of her cinema career. In addition to giving the best performance of the year in The Great Ziegfeld, Luise Rainer (rhymes with "shiner") gave highly distinguished ones in her first picture, Escapade, in which, newly arrived from Vienna, she became a star overnight when Myrna Loy refused to play the lead, and in The Good Earth, released too late for consideration last week. In one of the busiest 1936s in or out of the cinema industry, Immigrant Rainer not only became the No. 1 U. S. Cinemactress but also found time to fall in love with Playwright Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty), generally rated the ablest young U. S. Radical playwright, whom she married two months ago.

Academy Awards are gold-plated statuets nicknamed Oscars. Oscar for the 1936 best performance by an actor went last week to Paul Muni, who attended the banquet wearing the beard he used in his forthcoming The Woman I Love. The award was for his work in the title role of The Story of Louis Pasteur. Screenwriters Sheridan Gibney and Pierre Collings, who wrote and adapted The Story of Louis Pasteur, got two Oscars, for the best original screen story and the best screen adaptation of the year. Oscar for the best direction of the year went to Frank Capra for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The Academy gave out 15 other Oscars for everything from film editing to sound recording. Of these, four went to MGM, six to Warner Brothers. Biggest Oscar collection in Hollywood is that of Cartoonist Walt Disney. Last week he got his fifth, for the best cartoon of the year, Mickey Mouse's Country Cousin.

Rarest prize awarded by the Cinema Academy is its special award for an "outstanding contribution to the industry." Awarded only when the Special Award Committee feels that there has been a contribution outstanding enough to deserve it, the prize has been presented only five times in the past. It went to Charles Chaplin in 1928 for his single-handed feat of writing, acting, directing and producing The Circus and to Warner Brothers for "marking an epoch in motion picture history"; Shirley Temple (1935) for greatest individual contribution to screen entertainment;* Walt Disney (1932) for inventing Mickey Mouse; and David Wark Griffith (1936) as a belated tribute for outstanding contributions "to the advancement of the motion picture." Last week the Committee decided that in 1935-36 cinema had received a contribution outstanding "for having revolutionized one of the most important branches of the industry-- Newsreel. Its creativeness is looked upon by the Academy as a 'shot in the arm' for the whole newsreel field." At the banquet, Toastmaster George Jessel handed a Special Award Oscar to Vice President Roy Edward Larsen of TIME Inc. for THE MARCH OF TIME.

Launched in February 1935 by TIME'S Circulation Manager Larsen, who had already put THE MARCH OF TIME on the radio, and Louis de Rochemont, a Wartime naval line officer, later creator of Fox Movietone's "Magic Carpet" and "Adventures of a Newsreel Cameraman," the cinema MARCH OF TIME was hailed enthusiastically by cinema critics, dubiously by the industry. Currently, its audience appeal wholly vindicated by its influence on other newsreels as well as by its popularity, the monthly two-reeler, distributed by RKO, is being shown in 7,560 U. S., 1,247 British Isle, 485 Australian and New Zealand and 750 Spanish-speaking theatres. Next month THE MARCH OF TIME will move into its own three-story Manhattan building. Last week's award coincided with MARCH OF TIME'S first French translation. This week LA MARCHE DU TEMPS, produced in France by Brother Richard de Rochemont, will appear on the screens of French cinemansions, where audiences will hear the announcer say: La Marche du Temps!

*Miss Temple's Oscar was made half-size.

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