The Academy Awards began with boards from five areas of endeavor (directors, actors, producers, writers, and technicians) whose votes decided the nominations while a panel of judges from each board decided the winners. The eligibility period was from August 1, 1927-July 28, 1928, for films opening in Los Angeles during that period. An eligibility list was sent to members, but it was flawed. It included films playing in Los Angeles during the eligibility period, some of which had opened years before such as the 1925 version of Ben-Hur. Consequently, many of the nominations ended up being disqualified.

There were two prizes for Best Picture at the 1927/28 Awards, one for “Outstanding Picture”, the other for “Quality” on the nominating ballots. The names were changed to “Best Picture – Production” and “Best Picture – Unique and Artistic Production” for the record books. The first went to Wings and the second to Sunrise. Few would argue that although both were good films, Sunrise is the one that has held up the best over time. It would, however, be the only time that particular award was given. From 1928/29 forward, there would only be one Best Picture or as it was originally called, Best Production.

It is Oscar lore that there were no nominees at the 1928/29 awards, that a panel of judges decided the winners and that runners-up were subsequently added as nominees. That really wasn’t the case. The rules for that year were that the entire membership would put forward nominees from which the panel of judges would select ten in each category, whittle that down to five in each, and then decide the winners. From all of that, the best they could come up with for Best Picture was the ponderous musical, Broadway Melody while giving the Best Actress award to Mary Pickford for her horrible acting in Helen Hayes’ stage role in Coquette. Legend has that it was really for her serving tea to the panel of judges at Pickfair, her palatial home with then husband Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

The most memorable films released in Los Angeles during the 1928/29 eligibility period were the silent classics, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Docks of New York, and The Wind but they were brushed aside for the primitive sounds of The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Revue of 1929, which was a group of acts not a narrative film, and In Old Arizona, the loud and obnoxious first western talkie.

The panel of judges was gone by the 1929/30 awards which were voted on by the entire academy. The holdover anomaly from the first two years was that acting awards could be for either a single performance or a group of performances. Most, but not all the acting nominees were for multiple performances, but unlike 1927/28 when Janet Gaynor won for all three of her nominated performances, the wins this year could be for just one. They went to George Arliss for reprising his long-in-the-tooth stage role of Disraeli and Norma Shearer for The Divorcée over Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, but really for being Mrs. Irving Thalberg and therefore considered more worthy of MGM’s block vote than Garbo.

There was no dispute over the 19229/30 vote for Best Picture. It went to Universal’s still provocative All Quiet on the Western Front .

The 1930/31 awards changed the designation for acting awards to a single performance, which has remained the case ever since. Cimarron won Best Picture largely for its opening sequence commemorating the Oklahoma land rush. Oscar ignored City Lights, The Blue Angel, and Westfront 1918 altogether, and Little Caesar and The Public Enemy except for a single nomination each. Those five would have made a better slate than the five the Academy nominated.

The 1931/32 Best Picture award went to Grand Hotel which was the only award it was nominated for. Eligible films that Oscar ignored included Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which was good enough to get Fredric March an award for Best Actor but not good enough to be nominated for Best Picture in an eight-film race. Also ignored were Frankenstein and Scarface, so it was in pretty good company.

1932/33, whose eligibility period ran through December 31, 1933, saw nominations for ten films for Best Picture but still managed to ignore the likes of Dinner at Eight, King Kong, and M.

1934, with its twelve-film slate, managed to get things right with its five big wins for Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.

1935 got it mostly right with Mutiny on the Bounty winning Best Picture but where was the nomination for Alfred Hitchcock’s first masterpiece, The 39 Steps?

1936 saw the bloated musical The Great Ziegfled win Best Picture while the superior Show Boat, ironically first produced on Broadway by Ziegfeld himself, was ignored.

1937 got a lot right including the recognition accorded Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth but as McCarey himself acknowledged in his acceptance speech, they gave it to him for the wrong picture. It should have been for Make Way for Tomorrow.

Here then are the five films of the first decade that I think were most egregiously ignored by the Academy:

FILMS THE ACADEMY SHOULD HAVE NOMINATED BUT DIDN’T

WESTFRONT 1931, directed by G.W. Pabst (1931)

Like the concurrently filmed All Quiet on the Western Front, the German made Westfront 1918 provides a realistic view of World War I from the perspective of ordinary German soldiers but is less sentimental than the 1930 Oscar winner. When Lew Ayres goes home on leave in All Quiet on the Western Front he is welcomed with open arms by everyone. When Gustav Diessl goes home on leave in Westfront 1918 he finds his mother on a breadline and his wife in bed with the landlord. There is no reaching out for a butterfly at the ending of the latter film. The soldiers are simply shot and fall over dead.

DINNER AT EIGHT, directed by George Cukor (1933)

Oscar never gives its Best Picture award to the same type of film the following year so it was unlikely that the Oscar would go to this all-star comedy-drama which is superior in every way to the previous year’s all-star drama, Grand Hotel and certainly to this year’s winner, the episodic Cavalcade. It’s also superior to the play on which it is based with superlative performances from Marie Dressler as a faded Broadway star, John Barrymore as a has been matinee idol, Jean Harlow as tycoon Wallace Beery’s dim wife, Lionel Barrymore as a dying ship magnate and Billie Burke as his clueless wife among many others.

THE 39 STEPS, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1935)

The master of suspense’s first great film was one of the last he made in the U.K. before emigrating to the U.S. in 1939. No one remembers who was killed in the beginning of the film, who did it or why, or for that matter, what the significance of the 39 steps were, no matter how many times they’ve seen the film. What they do remember are the performances, particularly of Robert Donat as the innocent man on the run, Madeleine Carroll as the woman he kidnaps and is handcuffed to for a good portion of the film, and Peggy Ashcroft as the kindly crofter’s wife who risks a beating from her husband by giving the husband’s overcoat to Donat in a key early scene.

SHOW BOAT, directed by James Whale (1936)

The Oscar went to MGM’s overblown musical biography, The Great Ziegfeld, while Universal’s magnificent production of one of Ziegfeld’s last shows went unnominated and was later hidden for a number of years by MGM when they purchased the rights for their inferior 1951 remake. The once-in-a-lifetime cast includes Irene Dunne who rose to prominence as the star of the original touring version of the musical. Co-stars Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, and Charlie Winninger were culled from various stage productions of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s immortal triumph.

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, directed by Leo McCarey (1937)

Leo McCarey won his first Best Director Oscar for the marvelous Irene Dunne-Cary Grant comedy, The Awful Truth, but as he said in accepting his award, “you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” The film he was referring to was this then little appreciated gem about an elderly couple forced to move in separately with their grown children when they lose their home due to foreclosure. Beulah Bondi and Victor Mature are magnificent in their roles as are Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter as the son and daughter-in-law with whom Bondi goes to live. The scene where Bondi and Moore reunite for one last get-together is one of the most moving in film history.