Rhett Wickham: And the Oscar Should Have Gone To...
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1956 Best Actor in a Leading Role
LARRY ROBERTS and FRANK THOMAS – as Tramp
in LADY & THE TRAMP
Okay, so let me start with the one that I suspect will raise the most eyebrows. Frank Thomas never got better than this. Never. It’s smart, funny, charming, witty, sophisticated and a perfect combination of Cary Grant and, well…well that year’s winner, Ernest Borgnine in Marty. Tramp is so much more complicated than the overwrought James Dean in East of Eden (a sappy sentimental nod made because of Dean’s tragic death, and had he lived I suspect this would have been viewed by most as a solid but unmemorable performance at best. Granted, Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock and James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me more than deserve this nomination, but Frank Sinatra’s turn in The Man with the Golden Arm is …well it’s Frank Sinatra. *sigh* Thomas’s anthropomorphic mastery of the dog from the wrong side of the tracks is made even more impossibly impressive for lack of that opposable thumb, thank you very much. He’s a pitch perfect pooch, and if Ernie could win for Marty then Thomas should have at least been nominated for Tramp.
1956 Best Actress in a Supporting Role
PEGGY LEE & ERIC LARSON – as Peg in LADY &
THE TRAMP
The Winner was Jo Van Fleet for her performance in East of Eden. A career high for Larson, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, and a film moment that has easily outlived the work of the other ladies who got the nod that year, had the Academy recognized animators and voice actors then this would have been a slam dunk in our book. For one thing, the other performances - with the possible exception of Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause - have barely held their place in film history over half a century later, and I’m willing to bet that some garner a “who?�? or “what?�? from even the most devoted film fans, including Ms. Lee’s performance in Pete Kelley’s Blues for which she actually was nominated this year. That Peg was performed in pencil by a man also offers an outstanding argument for gender-blind nominations across the board. What Larson captured in his performance was arguably the most iconic of the 1950’s “bad girl�? characters who exhibited allure, brassy comedic timing, a subtextual pathos and detailed and specific acting that made audiences go wild. This vampy little Pekinese should have gone home with gold. (In addition to Wood, Lee and Van Fleet Other nominees in this category were Betsy Blair in Marty and Marisa Pavan in The Rose Tattoo.)
1978 Best Actress in a Supporting Role
GERALDINE PAGE & MILT KAHL – as Madame
Medusa in THE RESCUERS
I concede that Vanessa Redgrave’s brilliant work in Julia was the standout in 1977, but the lineup of other nominees could and should easily have been adjusted to make way for the kind of over-the-top character actress star turn that the Academy loves to recognize; exactly the kind of performance the curmudgeonly Kahl and the theatrical diva Page turned in opposite the most successful pair of Disney mice since Mickey and Minnie. Melinda Dillon’s performance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was heartfelt, to be sure, and even little Quinn Cummings in The Goodbye Girl deserves the usual Oscar
® nod for the kind of treacle that voters hold so dear. But Leslie Browne’s turn in The Turning Point and Tuesday Weld’s ditherings in Looking for Mr. Goodbar are flotsam by comparison to the lunacy of Medusa, a performance that rivals Olympia Dukakis’s scenery chewing pass in Moonstruck nearly a decade later. There was plenty of room here to shine a light on Milt Kahl’s swan-song, which still stands as one of his career highs, and I’d wager that had Geraldine Page performed this role in a live action film, then even Redgrave would have voted for her.
