RKO Radio
Oscar Nominations: 5
Picture, produced by David Hempstead
Director: Sam Wood
Actress: Ginger Rogers
Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo
Sound Recording: John Aalberg
Oscar Awards: 1
Actress
Oscar Context:
In 1940, Hitchcock's Oscar winning thriller “Rebecca” competed for the top award with nine other films: Hitchcock's own “Foreign Correspondent” (on of his lesser movies), “All This and Heaven Too,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Great Dictator,” “Kitty Foyle,” “The Letter,” “The Long Voyage Home,” “Our Town,” and “The Philadelphia Story.”
Like Hitchcock, John Ford had two movies in contention: “The Grapes of Wrath,” starring Henry Fonda, and “The Long Voyage Home,” with John Wayne. The three most nominated pictures were “Rebecca,” with 10 nods, John Ford's socially-aware class drama “The Grapes of Wrath,” and William Wyler's melodrama, The Letter,” each with 7.
Ginger Rogers won the Best Actress Oscar for her first and only nomination, in a year, in which Katharine Hepburn (in “The Philadelphia Story”) was deemed the strongest candidate.
The Best Director Oscar went to John Ford for “The Grapes of Wrath,” the Adapted Screenplay to Donald Ogden Stewart for “The Philadelphia Story,” and Sound Recording to MGM Douglas Shearer for the musical “Strike Up the Band.”
This was Dalton Trumbo's only Oscar nomination under his real name. Both Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, and Stewart were later blacklisted, using fronts for their work. Robert Rich was Trumbo's pseudonym as writer of “The Brave One,” and Ian McLellan Hunter as scribe of Roman Holiday.”