The great actress and director Ida Lupino never won an Academy Award for her work. The Academy also never gave her an honorary career award for her work later. And most jarring of all, she was never even nominated for an Oscar.
But she did get at least one prestigious acting award. The New York Film Critics Circle awarded her Best Actress of 1943 for her work in the Warner Bros. drama "The Hard Way". This organization describes their awards this way:
The Circle’s awards are often viewed as harbingers of the Oscar nominations, which are announced each February. The Circle’s awards are also viewed, perhaps more accurately, as a principled alternative to the Oscars, honoring aesthetic merit in a forum that is immune to commercial and political pressures.
The same year that Ida won the NYFCC best actress award, Paul Lukas won their best actor award for "Watch on the Rhine". This is a movie I haven't yet seen, and I'm not familiar with Lukas' career. So I looked up the Academy Awards that year anticipating that he had likely been overlooked as well. To my surprise, he not only had been nominated for an Oscar, but had won it.
This got me wondering--how unusual was it to win a top acting award from the New York Film Critics Circle, but to be completely neglected by the Oscar nomination process.
To find the answer, I studied the years 1935 through 1969. 1935 was the first year the NYFCC gave awards, and 1969, somewhat arbitrarily, is associated with the end of the classic Hollywood era. In one of those years, 1962, a newspaper strike prevented any awards from being given. That leaves 34 years of Best Actress and Best Actor awards from the NYFCC to compare to Oscar nominations.
It turns out that it is quite rare, though not unprecedented, for the winner of the NYFCC acting awards to be passed over for an Oscar nomination. Of the 68 NYFCC acting winners over that time period, only six did not receive any Oscar nomination for acting in the same year. Four of those six were actresses, and two were actors.
- 1935 : Greta Garbo, Anna Karenina
- 1943 : Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
- 1944 : Tallulah Bankhead, Lifeboat
- 1947 : Deborah Kerr, Black Narcissus; I See A Dark Stranger
- 1950 : Gregory Peck, Twelve O'Clock High
- 1952 : Ralph Richardson, The Sound Barrier
Ida is obviously in very good company here. I've not actually seen any of these films other than "The Hard Way", but I am now interested in seeking them out. I also plan to dive into each of these six NYFCC award winner to find out more about them and the roles that somehow beat them out for Oscar nominations.
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