has there ever been an actor or an actress that has been nominated for two movies in the same year? i seem to recall something like that happening a few years ago but i can’t recall. any help would be appreciated. thanks.
From the Academy’s database at www.oscars.org:
An actor has never had two Best or two Supporting nominations the same year.
1927/1928: Richard Barthelmess for The Noose and The Patent Leather Kid.
1927/1928: Emil Jannings, The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh.
1929/1930: George Arliss, Disraeli and The Green Goddess (he won only for the former).
1929/1930: Maurice Chevalier, The Big Pond and The Love Parade.
1929/1930: Ronald Colman, Bulldog Drummond and Condemned.
And Janet Gaynor won the very first Best Actress award (1927/28) for her performances in Sunrise, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel.
The British BAFTAs appear far more forgiving in multiple nominations. This year alone, Scarlett Johansson was nominated for “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” and “Lost in Translation” and won for the later. (“Monster” was apparently not elgible for this year’s awards.) So I then expected Sean Pean to win since he was nominated for “21 Grams” and “Mystic River” but Bill Murray won instead. (“Lost in Translation” was a big winner at BAFTA. Whoo-hoo!)
It may not be that the BAFTAs are more forgiving but that the campaigns to win BAFTA nominations are different than Oscar campaigns. Studios/agents/publicists/whoever pick a performance for an actor in a year and push that role for a nomination. It doesn’t help the chances of a nominee to compete against him/herself in the same category as s/he’ll split the votes between two performances.
OK… in the first couple of years that the Academy Awards were presented, the Best Actor and Best Actress awards were for the individual actor which could include more than one movie. Both movies (or three movies, as Otto pointed out) were listed on the ballot, but a win meant that the actor had won, not thier performance in one or the other particular film.
In the year following the 1929 -1930 awards, the rules were changed to allow only one nomination in each category, for a single movie performance.
That being said, the fact that you said George Arliss “won only for” Disraeli confused me. I looked it up on IMDB, and sure enough, it says that he was nominated for The Green Goddess and won for Disreali. This flied in the face of what I thought to be true, so much so that I actually went to look it up.
From 65 Years of the Oscar The Official History of the Academy Awards by Robert Osborne (I realize this book is ten years old, but history from the 1930’s has’t changed much since 1992):
The situation was the same for Norma Shearer as Best Actresses, and the books description here also explains the rule change:
Both quotes from page 25 of the book.
The listing of nominations for the first two years have each Actor and each Actress listed only once, with the film or films following their names. So even then they received only one nomination, and in subsequent years with the rules change they still received only one nomination, but then only for one film.