1944 – Barry Fitzgerald
Going My Way
Ok, I’m going to quickly address the elephant in the room, and I’m fully aware that many critics of the time, and probably people of today might disagree with me. This is a bogus nomination. Fitzgerald should not have been nominated for Best Actor, and for the simple reason that he was already nominated for an Oscar for the same role in the proper category. For the same roll. The unfairness of this nomination was… well… unfair. He was nominated, and won the award, in the Best Supporting Actor category! Can you imagine if he had won Best Actor as well, for the same performance!?!
His part within the narrative of the story was not a lead roll! He played Father Fitzgibbon, a curmudgonly Catholic priest in a run-down New York cathedral that is behind on its mortgage payments. The church is on the verge of forclosure. Now, if Father Fitzgibbon was the protagonist, the driving force behind the saving of the church, then he would have been the main character, but he wasn’t. Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley, the real leading character of the story, came in to save the church, and help the doddering old Fitzgibbon become less of a stick-in-the-mud. He simply reacted to the events taking place in the narrative, but he didn’t drive them.
So I have to ask why he was nominated for both categories. Well, to quote Wikipedia, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, when speaking of Crosby, wrote, “He has been stunningly supported by Barry Fitzgerald, who plays one of the warmest characters the screen has ever known. As a matter of fact, it is a cruel slight to suggest that this is Mr. Crosby’s show. It is his and Mr. Fitzgerald’s together. And they make it one of the rare delights of the year.” But he said it himself! Stunningly SUPPORTED BY…
Was Fitzgerald’s performance good? Absolutely, if you don’t mind the forced wholesomeness that was inherent in the script. And I don’t mind that he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Good for him, and I’m glad he took home his Oscar. But I guess it just sticks in my craw, just a little bit, that he was even nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actor category. It was undeserved.