Al Jolson | Through the Shattered Lens

The Academy Awards, 1929

They’ve been giving out Oscars for 91 years and, since the beginning, good films have often been snubbed.

Sometimes, a film is snubbed because it was too groundbreaking to be embraced at the time of its initial release. Sometimes, a film is snubbed because it was directed by the wrong person or it dealt with subject matter that was considered to be too controversial for the Academy to embrace. Sometimes, a film is snubbed because of a lack of publicity or a studio that failed to launch an effective awards campaign. And, sometimes, a good film is snubbed because it’s been a very good year and there’s only so many available slots.

There’s a lot of reasons but what it all come down to is that good films sometimes don’t get nominated for best picture.

So, in honor of those films, I’m going to take a decade-by-decade look at some of the best films that were not nominated for best picture. We’ll start with the 1920s, with the founding of the Academy in 1927. Here are 6 good films from the 20s that were not nominated for best picture!

It (1927, dir by Clarence G. Badger))

One of my favorite silent films of all time, It featured not only one of Clara Bow’s greatest performances but also a storyline that, at the time, was considered to be rather daring. Clara plays a shopgirl who never allows her love for her boss to interfere with her efforts to protect both her roommate and her roommate’s baby from two meddling welfare workers. Though It was not nominated for Best Picture, Clara Bow did star in very first film to win the top award, Wings.

Metropolis (1927, dir by Fritz Lang)

Having been released in the United States in January of 1927, this visionary German film was eligible to be nominated for best picture but it sadly went unnominated. Science fiction was a genre that long-struggled to get any meaningful recognition from the Academy. Fortunately, that appears to have changed a bit over the past few years.

The Jazz Singer (1927, dir by Alan Crosland)

The Jazz Singer has not aged particularly well and it’s impossible not to cringe when Al Jolson shows up in blackface. However, it was the first commercially successful film to incorporate sound recording and, as such, it pretty much changed cinematic history. In fact, it was such a game changer that legend has it that the Academy ruled it ineligible to compete for best picture because it was felt it would be unfair to all of the silent nominees. Instead, The Jazz Singer was given a special honorary award.

The General (1927, dir by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton)

Though Buster Keaton’s Civil War epic was made and screened in 1926, it didn’t receive a wide release until 1927, making it eligible for the first Academy Awards. However, since the initial critical and commercial reaction to the film was rather middling, The General was snubbed. Only later would the film be reevaluated and recognized as a classic screen comedy.

The Road to Ruin (1928, dir by Norton S. Parker)

This low-budget, independently made and distributed film became the second highest grossing movie of 1928, therefore showing that a film made outside the studio system could be a success. With its storyline about a teenage girl who gets caught up in a world of drugs, sex, and general decadence, it established many of the exploitation film tropes that are still in use today. The Road to Ruin was a Lifetime film before Lifetime. For that alone, it should have been nominated.

Pandora’s Box (1929, dir by G.W. Pabst)

G.W. Pabst’s classic melodrama is another film that wasn’t appreciated when it was originally released and therefore, both it and Louise Brooks were snubbed by the Academy. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s that Pandora’s Box finally started to receive the acclaim that it deserved.

Up next, in an hour or so, the 1930s!

Clara Bow in It (1927)

So, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve got a love for film trivia in general and Oscar trivia in particular. I also love to make lists. Last night, these twin loves led to me staying up way too late making a list of every single film ever nominated for best picture. As I looked down at that list, I thought to myself, “That’s not even a 1,000 movies. Why it would only take a few years for me to see and then review every single film ever nominated.” So, I am now a woman on a mission. Well, actually, I’m on several missions but this is definitely one of them.

Unfortunately, there is one nominee that its doubtful that I — or anyone else will ever see — and that is 1928’s The Patriot. Not only was it the last silent film to be nominated for best picture but it’s also the only nominee to subsequently become a “lost” film. With the exception of a few publicity stills and the film’s trailer, all trace of The Patriot has vanished. Maybe there’s a copy of it sitting in the corner of someone’s attic. It has happened in the past, after all. More likely though, the Patriot is simply gone.

Here’s the trailer:

The Patriot was based on the 1801 assassination of Tsar Paul I of Russia. Paul was played by Emil Jannings who, the previous year, had won the very first Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Last Command. Paul’s assassin — the patriot of the title — was played by character actor Lewis Stone who later played almost everyone’s father in the 1930s. Director Lubitsch was, like Jannings, a relatively recent arrival from Germany.

The Patriot was an expensive, “prestige” presentation that was pretty much doomed the moment that Al Jolson spoke in The Jazz Singer. With audiences now obsessed with “talking pictures,” the silent Patriot was a box office bomb. Paramount hastily withdrew the film from circulation, added a few sound effects (though no dialogue because of Jannings’s thick German accent), and then re-released the film with the little success. The Patriot — the last silent film nominated — lost to the first sound film to win Best Picture, Broadway Melody.

The box office failure of The Patriot pretty much drove the last nail into the coffin of the silent film era. Jannings reacted to the coming of sound by returning to his native Germany and continuing his film career there. He co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. As Germany’s most distinguished actor, Jannings was a supporter of Adolf Hitler and he appeared in several Nazi propaganda films during World War II. In 1945, following the fall of the Third Reich, Jannings reportedly carried his Oscar with him as he walked through the streets of Berlin. He died in Austria in 1950 at the age of 65.

Lewis Stone, meanwhile, prospered in sound films and was a busy character actor until he died of a heart attack in 1953. Reportedly, he dropped dead while chasing some neighborhood children who had been throwing rocks at his garage.

Ernest Lubitsch also had a very succesful career in Hollywood and specialized in sophisticated romantic comedies and musicals. While Jannings was making propaganda films for Hitler, Lubitsch was directing the anti-Nazi comedy, To Be Or Not To Be. He died of a heart attack in 1947, reportedly while having sex with a starlet who was auditioning for a role in his latest film.

The Patriot remains lost.