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If the Academy was in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel—The Central Board of Judges—and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.
It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.
The Broadway Melody is one of the weakest best picture winners ever, and that's saying something. It's the story of two sisters who go to New York and fall for the same guy. As musicals go, it did feature the classic title tune, but the story is trite and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.
At least the Board of Judges made Mayer happy—it was his studio, MGM, that produced The Broadway Melody.
Another two of the top awards went to co-founders of the Academy. Mary Pickford, who won the Katie as best actress in 1927-28, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette. Audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time but critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.
Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.
As for the best actor winner, I encourage you to go to Turner Classic Movies and watch some clips of Warner Baxter's performance as the Cisco Kid from In Old Arizona. If your head doesn't explode, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. Check out the clip entitled "Ham and Eggs." Ostensibly, the ham refers to the Kid's breakfast, but don't you believe it.
Two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, The Patriot, an Ernst Lubitsch movie which also provided a best actor nominee, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures—Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether. Aside from losing irreplaceable works of art, Hollywood's negligence makes my task of handing out coveted Katie awards all the more difficult. They have a lot to answer for.
Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.
The nominees for the 1928-29 Katie Awards are:
PICTURE:
The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton)
The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann)
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)
The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström)
ACTOR:
George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York)
Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask)
Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
ACTRESS:
Marion Davies (Show People)
Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Lillian Gish (The Wind)
Bessie Love (The Broadway Melody)
DIRECTOR:
Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou)
Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Victor Sjöström (The Wind)
SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life)
Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs)
Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Olga Baclanova (The Docks Of New York)
Mary Nolan (West Of Zanzibar)
Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)
SCREENPLAY:
Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders (The Docks Of New York)
Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Frances Marion (The Wind)
I'll start handing out Katies a couple of days from now, beginning with Best Screenplay ...
Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.
Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.
And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.
There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.
Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.
Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.
In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.
The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus
The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare
Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love
The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker
The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis
Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind
All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.
You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.
What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.
The Broadway Melody is one of the weakest best picture winners ever, and that's saying something. It's the story of two sisters who go to New York and fall for the same guy. As musicals go, it did feature the classic title tune, but the story is trite and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.
As for the best actor winner, I encourage you to go to Turner Classic Movies and watch some clips of Warner Baxter's performance as the Cisco Kid from In Old Arizona. If your head doesn't explode, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. Check out the clip entitled "Ham and Eggs." Ostensibly, the ham refers to the Kid's breakfast, but don't you believe it.
Two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, The Patriot, an Ernst Lubitsch movie which also provided a best actor nominee, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures—Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether. Aside from losing irreplaceable works of art, Hollywood's negligence makes my task of handing out coveted Katie awards all the more difficult. They have a lot to answer for.
ACTOR: 
SUPPORTING ACTOR: 
