13th Academy Awards | |
---|---|
Date | February 27, 1941 |
Site | Biltmore Bowl, Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles, California |
Hosted by | Bob Hope |
Highlights | |
Best Picture | Rebecca |
Most awards | The Thief of Bagdad (3) |
Most nominations | Rebecca (11) |
The 13th Academy Awards were held on February 27, 1941, to honor films released in 1940. This was the first year that sealed envelopes were used to keep the names of the winners secret. [1] The accounting firm of Price Waterhouse was hired to count the ballots, after voting results in 1939 were leaked by the Los Angeles Times . [2] The gathering was addressed over the radio by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. [2]
Walter Brennan's victory for his performance in The Westerner made him the first person to win an Academy Award more than twice. [2]
Best Original Screenplay was introduced at this ceremony, alongside Best Screenplay, which would eventually become Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Story.
Independent producer David O. Selznick, who had produced the previous year's Best Picture winner Gone with the Wind (1939), produced the film with the most nominations again this year, Rebecca (11), and campaigned heavily for its win. [3] The film won Best Picture, making Selznick the first to produce two consecutive winners; its only other win was for Best Cinematography (Black and White), marking the last time to date a film would win Best Picture but not win for either directing, acting, or writing.
The film's distributor, United Artists, was the last of the original film studios (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros., RKO Radio, Universal, and Paramount) to win Best Picture. Rebecca was the first American film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and the only one of his films to win Best Picture. Hitchcock had two films nominated for Best Picture, the other being Foreign Correspondent , and two other directors also had two films in the running: Sam Wood ( Our Town and Kitty Foyle ) and John Ford ( The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath , which won Best Director).
Pinocchio was the first animated feature film to win competitive Oscars, for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, starting a long tradition of animated films winning in these categories. The Thief of Bagdad received the most Oscars of the evening (3), the first time a film not nominated for Best Picture won the most awards. This and Pinocchio were the first films not nominated for Best Picture to receive multiple awards in Oscar history.
Nominees were announced on February 10, 1941. Winners are listed first and highlighted in boldface. [4]
For the first time, names of all winners remained secret until the moment they received their awards, a practice that has continued ever since. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a six-minute direct radio address to the attendees from the White House. It is the first time an American president participated in the event.
Awards | Film |
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3 | The Thief of Bagdad |
2 | The Grapes of Wrath |
The Philadelphia Story | |
Pinocchio | |
Rebecca |
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David O. Selznick was an American film producer, screenwriter and film studio executive who produced Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), both of which earned him an Academy Award for Best Picture. He also won the Irving Thalberg Award at the 12th Academy Awards, Hollywood's top honor for a producer, in recognition of his shepherding Gone with the Wind through a long and troubled production and into a record-breaking blockbuster.
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Rebecca is a 1940 American romantic psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was Hitchcock's first American project, and his first film under contract with producer David O. Selznick. The screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, and adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, were based on the 1938 novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.
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Joan Harrison was an English screenwriter and producer. She became the first female screenwriter to be nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar when the category was introduced in 1940, and was the first screenwriter to receive two Academy Award nominations in the same year in separate categories, for co-writing the screenplay for the films Foreign Correspondent (1940) (original) and Rebecca (1940) (adapted), both directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with whom she had a long professional relationship.
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David O. Selznick (1902–1965) was an American motion picture producer whose work consists of three short subjects, 67 feature films, and one television production made between 1923 and 1957. He was the producer of the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind. Selznick was born in Pittsburgh and educated in public schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He began working in the film industry in New York while in his teens as an assistant to his father, jeweler-turned-film producer Lewis J. Selznick. In 1923, he began producing films himself, starting with two documentary shorts and then a minor feature, Roulette (1924). Moving to Hollywood in 1926, Selznick became employed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he produced two films before switching to Paramount in early 1928. After helping to guide Paramount into the sound era, Selznick moved to RKO Radio in 1931 where he served as the studio's executive producer. During his time at RKO he oversaw the production of King Kong (1933) and helped to develop Katharine Hepburn and Myrna Loy into major film stars.
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