7th Academy Awards: choose your alternate nominees (1934)
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Classic Film
sheetsadam1 — 3 months ago(January 05, 2026 08:56 PM)
The idea is this: what if the nominees for Best Picture each year weren't nominated? Which films should have taken their place in that scenario? Pick your alternate selections for Best Picture and, if you wish, mention anybody who you feel was overlooked in any other category. No need to confine yourself to the types of films which typically get nominated or to English-language cinema. If you missed the previous years, they can be found on the classic film board.
The 7th Academy Awards finally resolved the release date issue. All films released in 1934 are eligible.
The nominees were:
It Happened One Night- Frank Capra
The Barretts of Wimpole Street - Sidney Franklin
Cleopatra - Cecil B. DeMille
Flirtation Walk - Frank Borzage
The Gay Divorcee - Mark Sandrich
Here Comes the Navy - Lloyd Bacon
The House of Rothschild - Alfred L. Werker
Imitation of Life - John M. Stahl
One Night of Love - Victor Schertzinger
The Thin Man - W. S. Van Dyke
Viva Villa! - Jack Conway
The White Parade - Irving Cummings
My alternate picks:
The Black Cat - Edgar G. Ulmer
Judge Priest - John Ford
The Man Who Knew Too Much - Alfred Hitchcock
The Merry Widow - Ernst Lubitsch
Twentieth Century - Howard Hawks
Treasure Island - Victor Fleming
Of Human Bondage - John Cromwell
L'Atlante - Jean Vigo
The Scarlet Empress - Josef von Sternberg
Yet I'm not sure I'd rank any of them ahead of
It Happened One Night
or
The Thin Man
.
"Praise be to Allah." - President Donald J. Trump, Easter Sunday 04/05/2026
- Frank Capra
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PygmyLion — 3 months ago(January 06, 2026 01:14 AM)
7th Academy Awards
There are a lot of movies that I think are good from 1934, but not that many I really like. Further, I'm not a big fan of Claudette Colbert, and of course 3 of the movies on the Academy Awards list star Claudette Colbert.
This is immediately going to get me in trouble with a lot of old movie buffs, because the winner in 1934
It Happened One Night
, which is rated 8.1 on IMDB is just a 7 for me and thus just a good movie.
The only movie on the nominees list that I really like is
The Thin Man
.
From your alternative list,
Treasure Island
is fairly good.
So in the end, my list of nominees is rather short and contains 3 under the radar picks:
Heat Lightning- Mervyn LeRoy
Little Man, What Now? - Frank Borzage
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Harold Young
The Thin Man - W.S. Van Dyke
Treasure Island - Victor Fleming
Heat Lightning
is probably my favorite.
- Mervyn LeRoy
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sheetsadam1 — 3 months ago(January 06, 2026 04:19 AM)
There are a lot of movies that I think are good from 1934, but not that many I really like.
I think I would agree with that. I haven't seen all of the actual nominees, but besides the two I singled out none of them that I have really stand out.
I wonder, have you watched
Judge Priest
? It's a good movie, certainly among the better ones that year from my perspective. But Ford remade it a few decades later under the title
The Sun Shines Bright
and
that version
may just be the most underrated in his entire filmography!
"Praise be to Allah." - President Donald J. Trump, Easter Sunday 04/05/2026 -
PygmyLion — 2 months ago(January 06, 2026 02:17 PM)
I haven't seen
Judge Priest
. It sounds sort of interesting. Will Rogers is usually fun to watch. Looking at the User Reviews on IMDB, there seems to be a number of users who don't feel it is politically correct. -
PygmyLion — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 02:21 PM)
I watched
Judge Priest
, it was good but I don't think that I would put it on my Oscar nominee list.
Perhaps a movie that a PC person should avoid, as there is a lot of pro-Confederacy sentiment in the movie. I imagine the small town was probably in southern Kentucky, as northern Kentucky tended to be more pro-Union. -
sheetsadam1 — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 03:38 PM)
Glad you got a chance to watch it! If I remember right (been a while since I watched it), it was definitely the more comedic of the two versions of the story.
There's a much later movie that deals with Kentucky during the Civil War,
Pharoah's Army
(1995) with Kris Kristofferson. Kentucky is a bit of a mess to classify geographically even today, with basically every region having as much in common culturally with the state it's closest to as it does with other regions of the state. Oddly enough, both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born there.
"Praise be to Allah." - President Donald J. Trump, Easter Sunday 04/05/2026 -
Uncreative — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 03:57 PM)
Other than It Happened One Night and The Thin Man the only other 1934 movie I've seen is The Man Who Knew too much. So that one I guess.
Also Tarzan & His Mate, because of that pre-code nude scene swimming in the lake. -
sheetsadam1 — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 04:17 PM)
Interesting. I've never watched any of the original Tarzan movies except the first one.
If you're into Universal horror (iirc,
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
were among your picks last week),
The Black Cat
is worth watching. Unfortunately, it's one of the few movies the director ever made for a major studio during a long career that saw him working mostly at the extreme fringes of the film industry. But he will be mentioned again when I get to 1945.
"Praise be to Allah." - President Donald J. Trump, Easter Sunday 04/05/2026 -
sheetsadam1 — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 04:34 PM)
I'm actually reading something now where Will Hays is something of a background player… It mentions his early days with what's now the MPAA and how there was already a push for more censorship in the early 1920s. His position at the time was that the studios could regulate themselves and that the box office returns would dictate whether or not something was in "good taste." He seems to have changed his opinion over the next decade or so
"Praise be to Allah." - President Donald J. Trump, Easter Sunday 04/05/2026 -
PygmyLion — 2 months ago(January 07, 2026 05:41 PM)
Maureen O'Sullivan is pretty cute as Jane in
Tarzan and His Mate
. I recall some of the animal depictions being a little poor in it. Another one of those movies that I think is good, but wouldn't put on an Oscar nominations list.