The Women + the Oscars

Roz definitely should've bagged the Best Supporting Actress award. She was always on, always fantastic. Roz looked like she really enjoyed playing Sylvia.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

It certainly deserved multiple Oscar nominations, particularly for Mary Boland as Best Supporting Actress but 1939 was a very tough year to get a nomination for anything.

I doubt Rosalind Russell would have approved of her being submitted as a possible Best Supporting Actress nominee. She fought for starring billing with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford and to be included in the "star photographs" released for the film, even though the part clearly was not as important as either Mary or Crystal. I can't blame her, she had already moved up to leading lady status by this time. And remember 15 years later, Rosalind wouldn't let Columbia submit her for Best Supporting Actress consideration for PICNIC even that one was blatantly a supporting role, she may have accepted a rare supporting part but she was not going to be treated like a supporting actress.

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I couldn't possibly agree more! Maybe they should've waited to release the film because hardly any film stood a chance against GWTW for an Oscar for anything. I commented on the "I am Sylvia Fowler" thread, Rosalind Russel very much deserved a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her performance here; she was very underrated as Sylvia Fowler and so many of her lines still crack me up every time I re-watch the film:


"It's an English saddle; I refuse point blank to ride one of those Western things."


"What I go through to keep my figure! Do I see red when some fat lazy dinner partner says to me: 'and what do you with yourself all day Mrs. Fowler?'"

"Lot's my friends exit horizontally."

"You remember the awful things they printed about 'what's-her-name' before she jumped out the window? See? I can't even remember her name so who cares, Edith?"

"He picked a quarrel with me, so I ordered him out of the house. Did I know he had pictographs hidden all over the place? Did I know I had given him complete grounds for incompatibility, all recorded on nasty little disks in the most awful-sounding language?"

"Someday you'll need a girlfriend! And then you'll think of your treachery to me!"



Ignore the trolls! Any failure to do so will only grant them the satisfaction they seek!

My thoughts are that one does indeed need to look further for proof than this tiresome combo of a sob story, sporadically-amusing-at-best slapstick and a blatherfest of such epic proportions you´re lucky not to get a brain tumor from all the ceaseless yakking (most of all by Russell in her supposedly, ahem, "amazing" performance). A goddamned chick flick this is, with a pat happy ending, no less.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

1939 was one of the best years in film history, and the market was already flooded come Oscar time thanks to GONE WITH THE WIND & WUTHERING HEIGHTS & THE WIZARD OF OZ & now THE WOMEN (just saw it today!)...this was the first time I've ever seen Norma Shearer, and she was absolutely fantastic as she underplayed it while her supporting cast went berserk! Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine & Paulette Goddard could have totally swept the Supporting Actress category!

Imagine throwing Bette Davis or Tallulah Bankhead into that astounding cast of catfights!

Roz may have cost herself a Supporting Oscar in 1955 for "Picnic," because she refused to be considered in the supporting category. Doubtlessly all they back in '39, she would have felt the same way.

And incidentally, when it comes to 1939, I think supporting actor should have gone to Bert Lahr as the hammy cowardly lion. No one else.

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Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies every problem.