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.

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

It's the only Tarzan movie I've seen and I only watched it because the movie always came up in any discussion about why the Hays code existed.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.