The Oscars

In the Hollywood system of production, movies try to please so many cooks that they often wind up not even pleasing the customers. In recent years, a few hyphenated moviemakers (i.e., writer-producers or writer-directors) have been pleasing the public with pictures that bear the stamp of one talented man trying to please himself. Last week Hollywood noted and approved the trend by giving its Academy Award for the best movie of 1949 to All the King's Men, written, directed and produced by Robert Rossen (TIME, Dec. 5). Also, the two

Oscars for screenplay and direction went to one man, 20th Century-Fox's Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for his A Letter to Three Wives (TIME, Jan. 17, 1949).

For their roles as the grass-roots demagogue and his hard-bitten secretary in All the King's Men, Broderick Crawford won the Academy Award for the year's best male performance and radio's Mercedes McCambridge, playing her first screen part, took the Oscar for the best job by a supporting actress. The Academy voted the best-actress award (her second) to Olivia de Havilland for playing the jilted wallflower in The Heiress, and recognized a bald Dean Jagger's retread adjutant in Twelve O'Clock High as the best male supporting performance.

Most everybody agreed that the dullest show of 1950 seemed to be the Academy Awards presentation itself at Hollywood's RKO Pantages Theater. A day before, Daily Variety had filled its front page with a completely accurate poll takers' forecast of the big awards. No one was surprised at the absence of foreign films or players among the major winners. Unlike last year, when Britain's Hamlet carried the day, none had been nominated. But the Academy's directors found it in their hearts to create a special award for Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief as the best foreign-language film of the year.

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