Haven't seen 40YOV yet, but I love Steve Carrell. It looks funny as all get out.

She usually annoys me, but Stephanie Zacharach's review of The New World over at Salon (day pass required) is cracking me up.

And in classic movie news, I watched It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (HUH. BUH.), last night. Very enjoyable. I say it well deserved to walk away with all five major Oscars that year (movie, director, screenplay, actor, actress), but I have no idea what it was up against, so that wouldn't be an honest assessment. Still, it's a very funny movie, with very pretty, and talented, people in it.

It Happened One Night

I watched that about a month ago. I love it. Colbert and Gable play so well off each other. And talk about the snark? Wonderful!

The scene where the detectives show up at their cabin and Colbert just dives right in to the fake conversation Gable whips up, with only a second's warning, is pure genius.

One of my favorites. Have not seen "Virgin" yet...kind of debating about it.

I had to go check and see what It Happened One Night beat in the Oscars.

Leading Actor -- William Powell (The Thin Man) and Frank Morgan (The Affairs of Cellini)

Leading Actress --- Grace Moore (One Night of Love), Norma Shearer (The Barretts of Whimpole Streeet), and Bette Davis as a write in candidate for Of Human Bondage

Directing -- WS Van Dyke (The Thin Man) and Victor Shertzinger (One NIght of Love)

Outstanding Production -- The Barretts of Whimpole Street, Cleopatra, Flirtation Walk, The Gay Divorcee, Here Comes the Navy, The House of Rothschild, Imitation of Life, One Night of Love, The Thin Man, Viva Villa!, and The White Parade. The studios were listed by each movie title so I guess the award went to the studio.

Writing (adaptation)--- Farnces Goodrich and Albert Hackett (Thin Man), Ben Becht ( Viva Villa!)

The nominations were clearly a bit of a different creature back then, but there's some stiff competition there, at least in the acting categories. I haven't seen enough of the other picture noms (and boy, were there a LOT) to judge that.

I think I'd be hard pressed to pick between William Powell in Thin Man and Gable in Happened One Night. I was thinking as I was watching how Gable's performance was as enoyable as one of Powell's, little did I know....

I haven't seen the other Best Actress noms, but Colbert could have been nominated 3 times -- her performances in Cleopatra and Imitation of Life are also excellent.

Did the Academy have two Best Picture (well, Best Picture and Best Film) awards only in 1927? At first, I thought the excessive number of nominees against IHON was due to two categories, but the more I think about it, the more I seem to recall that they only had that split in the first year of awards.

Did the Academy have two Best Picture (well, Best Picture and Best Film) awards only in 1927?

It was an award for Outstanding Picture and one for Unique and Artistic Picture in 1927/28. I am not entirely certain of the distinction, and clearly, neither was the Academy, as the very next ceremony for 1928/29, they had dropped the Unique and Artistic Picture category. Both categories were given to the studio responsible for the movie in question, much as Best Picture is given to the producing team today. That's a relic of the old studio system, and in fact, by 1929/30, they had changed the name of the category to Oustanding Production, which (I believe) it remained until it got changed to Best Picture.

And further research says that the Oustanding Production category became the Oustanding Motion Picture Category in 1941, Best Motion Picture in 1944 (the same year they finally decided to limit the field to five noms), and finally Best Picture in 1962.

And it was 1951 when they finally started giving the award to the actual producers by name, rather than handing out the award to the parent studio.