![]() ![]() Scrooged only got a Best Makeup nomination and was a modest box-office success. The 1951 Scrooge with Alistair Sim that everybody says is the best version of A Christmas Carol ever (though try telling that to a Muppets fan actually, don’t) was a box-office disappointment in the U.S. Score and Song nominations were likely based on John Williams’ sterling reputation. Home Alone was beat up by critics and resented for its commercial success. You could say this was an unusually roundabout path towards becoming a holiday classic, except it’s kind of true of all the movies that have settled into the present-day Christmas canon. It’s become a Christmas tradition, and by far the best-known of the crop of 1946 Oscar nominees and winners. (There’s no proof of this, yet that’s probably what inspired TBS to run 24 hours of A Christmas Story, but I digress.) This went on until 1993, when a loophole was closed, and NBC purchased sole rights to air the film, as they continue to do presently, twice a year, one of them on Christmas Eve. This is why the joke was always that you could watch It’s a Wonderful Life around the clock during December. TV stations, seeing a free programming they could plug in around the holidays, began to run it incessantly. Capra would go on to direct a handful of other movies (including Pocketful of Miracles in 1961), but was never again nominated for Best Director.Īnd It’s a Wonderful Life went away for decades, until 1974, when the great Clerical Era That Saved Christmas allowed the copyright on the film to lapse, and thus It’s a Wonderful Life entered the public domain. ![]() ![]() The Oscar drubbing (it did receive a non-competitive technical award) seemingly put It’s a Wonderful Life out of the public imagination forever. The sweep by The Best Years of Our Lives was, many assumed, the final nail in the coffin for It’s a Wonderful Life, which was a box-office disappointment and generally viewed by critics as overly sentimental and self-indulgent. Four of those losses came to The Best Years of Our Lives, the topical post-WWII picture directed by William Wyler, who at the time was co-founder, with Capra, of Liberty Films, which distributed It’s a Wonderful Life. One hopes Frank Capra had a lot of friends on the night of the 1946 Academy Awards, when It’s a Wonderful Life showed up with five Oscar nominations - for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (James Stewart), Best Editing, and Best Sound - and lost all five. Sure, George Bailey may have lost out on a life of wealth, freedom, and globe-hopping, but he does have friends. That line is one of the great consolation prizes in all of American fiction. “No man is a failure who has friends,” says Clarence, Angel Second-Class, to George Bailey at some point during George’s long, dark night of the soul that happens way farther into director Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life than you think. The 1946 Oscars saw Frank Capra’s holiday masterpiece overtaken by a film that was even more sentimentally resonant. ![]()
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