Did They Get it Right? – Best Director – Oscars 1933

Here are the five nominees: (Winner in Bold)

Frank Capra (Lady for a Day)

George Cukor (Little Women)

Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade)

Biggest Snub:

Leo McCarey – Duck Soup

My Overall Thoughts:

This is a year where two of the nominees did great jobs with their films and one just gave us something extremely boring, unfortunately the academy went with the latter.

My Rankings:

Directing

3. Frank Lloyd
2. George Cukor 
1. Frank Capra

Movies

3. Cavalcade – Terrible movie. One of the worst Best picture winners that Ive seen.
2. Little Women – Nice story that does a wonderful job depicting life on the homefront during the Civil War. The four sisters are quite different from one another and give us an even better understanding of the kinds of women who grew up during that time. The cast is great with Hepburn obviously standing out among them all. Nominated for only three Oscars that year including Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay (which it won). It was able to get 3rd place in one of the few years where they actually announced the two runner up films.
1. Lady for a Day – Really enjoyable film that highlights one of Capra’s favorite themes of down on their luck characters trying to make it during the Depression era. The facade works quite well and we get to see how they switch things around by showing the lower class characters being much more intelligent than the upper class ones. The dialogue is great and they manage to keep things both serious and slightly comedic at the same time since they are trying to show a social phenomena. Not Capra’s best, but still very entertaining to watch.

Do I agree with the Oscar winner? – Not at all!  Really boring film and either of the other two films would have been better choices.

Let me know what you think about these films and my rankings!