The Oscar Quest: Best Supporting Actor – 1951
The great thing about 1951, for the acting categories, is that you can just say, A Streetcar Named Desire, and that eliminates any questions. The bad thing about 1951 is that A Streetcar Named Desire didn’t win Best Picture. Which is just strange.
An American in Paris wins Best Picture. I’m not sure anyone has ever figured out why. Even stranger is that the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, didn’t win Best Director for it. George Stevens won Best Director for A Place in the Sun (a terrible decision, talked about here). This reminds me of the year after this. The Best Picture/Best Director split alongside the best film not winning Best Picture makes me think they deliberately didn’t want to vote for it. I don’t get it. Streetcar is an American classic.
Humphrey Bogart (finally) wins Best Actor this year for The African Queen (talked about here). This was a career win, pure and simple. The clear best performance was Brando in Streetcar, but Streetcar winning the rest of the acting awards — Best Actress for Vivien Leigh, Best Supporting Actress for Kim Hunter, and this category — probably made it feel like overload. Plus Bogart is one of the few names (alongside Henry Fonda and John Wayne) who, if they won an Oscar for any performance, any year, no one would question it because they are who they are. So, I accept the decision (plus Brando won twice after this), but based on what performance won and what didn’t, it was a terrible decision.
So, that’s 1951. Great, outside of Best Picture and Best Director. What the hell happened?
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – 1951
And the nominees were…
Leo Genn, Quo Vadis
Karl Malden, A Streetcar Named Desire
Kevin McCarthy, Death of a Salesman
Peter Ustinov, Quo Vadis
Gig Young, Come Fill the Cup (more…)
Can You Feel The Love Tonight: A Pictorial Analysis of a Sex Scene That Wasn’t There When You Were Six
Sometimes you think you knew it all, only to be surprised.
Most people, when they reach college age, they begin to understand that the Disney films of their youth may have a little more subtext than we once thought:
(Which they conveniently cut out of this DVD release. The scene fades just as the “sex” cloud goes into the air. Hence the reason that photo looks like shit. It’s from an old copy I found online.)
Of course there’s more. The penis in The Little Mermaid, etc. (I don’t count the racism, because subtext implies that it’s not out in the open.) But, you come to realize that Disney films are a bit more adult than you thought they were when you were a child. And you see stuff like that sex cloud up there, and you think that’s it. But then you discover more. Much more.
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