The Oscars

Hollywood's leading citizens, aglitter and atwitter one evening last week in the little Academy Award Theater, gulped when they heard the announcement. To Britain, target of many a ripe tomato for its quotas on U.S. films, went the choicest plum of U.S. filmdom: the Oscar for the year's best picture. The winner: J. Arthur Rank's Hamlet (TIME, June 28).

Not only did Hamlet become the first foreign movie ever to capture the big prize, but its title-role performance by Sir Laurence Olivier was judged the best by an actor in 1948. Olivier's Hamlet also cinched the distinction of being the year's most laureled picture by winning three other Oscars: black & white art direction, set decoration and costume design. Another Rank film, The Red Shoes, took three more technical honors, for its sets and art direction in color, and musical score.

All in the Family. The audience recovered from its surprise quickly enough to admire the fair play of the Academy's 1,450 voting members. For some, another surprise was the fate of 20th Century-Fox's major contender, The Snake Pit, which won only one award, for its sound recording.

Of Hollywood's own, Warner Brothers came off with much the best of it. Its Treasure of the Sierra Madre brought three awards to one family: two to John Huston, for his direction and screen play, and one to his father, Walter Huston, for the best male supporting performance, as Treasure's garrulous old roustabout prospector. Jane Wyman, the deaf-mute of Warner's Johnny Belinda, was named the year's best actress. Claire Trevor got an Oscar for the best supporting performance by an actress, in the Huston-directed Key Largo. Bustling Warner Producer Jerry Wald got the Irving Thalberg Award for "top achievement in production."

State of the Cinema. For Boss Jack Warner, the triumph was edged with irony. It was no secret that Warner had allowed Johnny Belinda to be made only over his protests and that he had parted company with its director, Jean Negulesco, when the picture was finished. It was also well known that Warner had thoroughly disliked Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had held up its release and later parted company with Director Huston. At the presentation, Jack Warner had to listen to a pointed slight in Huston's acceptance speech: "If this [the Oscar] were hollow and had a drink in it, I would toast--Henry Blanke [Treasure's self-effacing producer]."

Most of what the 21st annual awards told of the state of the cinema in 1948 lay in the presentation shindig itself. Planned in Hollywood's new economy, the affair was low-budgeted and undersized compared to past performances of the town's most profitable yearly publicity stunt. Only two searchlights cut into the overcast outside the theater; half a dozen blocks away, three Hollywood searchlights blazed gaudily for the opening of a new self-service gas station.

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