Oscar has four acting categories, one each for Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress. Actors who are co-leads in their films with other actors and actresses who are co-leads with other actresses can be nominated in the same category or, as is often the case lately, one can be can nominated as a lead and the other as a supporting player.

The first film to have multiple nominees in the same category was 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty for which Clark Gable, Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone were all nominated for Best Actor. The oddest example is Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald nominated for Best Actor 1944’s Going My Way with Fitzgerald also picking up a supporting nod for the same role. He was the only actor ever to be nominated in two categories for the same performance, winning in support while Crosby won in lead, causing a change in Academy rules.

Other examples include Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in 1950’s All About Eve, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift in 1953’s From Here to Eternity, Rock Hudson and James Dean in 1956’s Giant Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in 1958’s The Defiant Ones, Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn in 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in 1964’s BecketMidnight Cowboy, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine in 1972’s Sleuth, William Holden and Peter Finch in 1976’s Network, F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce in 1984’s Amadeus and Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in 1991’s Thelma & Louise.

Co-leads nominated in support while their co-stars were nominated in lead include Catherine Zeta-Jones (winner) in 2002’s Chicagoand Cate Blanchett in 2006’s Notes on a Scandal.

Then there were these:

NON-NOMINATED CO-LEADS

MYRNA LOY in THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936), directed by Robert Z. Leonard

Loy made such a strong impression playing exotic characters like the daughter of Fu Manchu that her warm, sophisticated characters culminating in The Thin Man almost seemed like they were the product of another actress. She altered her persona once again to play the glamorous young actress Billie Burke was in her heyday. Luise Rainer as Anna Held, Ziegfeld’s common-law wife (first wife in the film) and Loy as Burke (Ziegfeld’s only legal wife, his second wife in the film) both gave much admired performances but only Rianer was nominated for Best Actress, an award she won.

FREDRIC MARCH in INHERIT THE WIND (1960), directed by Stanley Kramer

A fictionalized version of the Scopes monkey trial of the 1920s, Spencer Tracy played a character based on famed attorney and fighter for liberal causes, Clarence Darrow and March a character based on arch-conservative, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan who square off on opposite sides of the fight for the right to teach evolution in a school in the deep South. Both actors are brilliant with March earning a Golden Globe nomination for his take on Brady. It was Tracy’s Darrow, however, that the Academy liked better, ignoring March’s bravura performance.

MAURICE CHEVALIER in FANNY (1961), directed by Joshua Logan

Marcel Pagnol’s 1930s French film trilogy had been turned into a 1954 Broadway musical and the musical back into a straight drama with the score as background music in the film version. Leslie Caron and Horst Buccholz were young lovers Fanny and Marius, Charles Boyer was Marius’ father, Cesar, and Chevalier was his friend Panisse who steps in and marries Fanny whom Marius has unknowingly left pregnant when he ran off to sea. Both Boyer and Chevalier are terrific with the Globes favoring Chevalier and the Academy favoring Boyer while ignoring Chevalier’s best non-singing role ever.

JOAN CRAWFORD in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich

54-year-old Bette Davis and 57-year-old Crawford were both in the twilight of their careers, neither of them able to demand starring roles in major films any longer when director Aldrich got the brainstorm to cast the two golden age superstars as faded stars of yesteryear, two Norma Desmonds as it were, for the price of one. Davis as the more grotesque former child star got most of the attention for her bizarre makeup and bitchy performance while Crawford, equally effective as her once bigger star sister now confined to a wheelchair, got the audience’s sympathy most of the way. Davis got the Oscar nomination but Crawford got a sort of revenge by accepting for winner Anne Bancroft.

AVA GARDNER and DEBORAH KERR in THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), directed by John Huston

Seventeen years earlier Gardner and Kerr were the women in Clark Gable’s life in Kerr’s first Hollywood film, The Hucksters. Now they were two of the women in Richard Burton’s life in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ play about a defrocked minister. Gardner is his feisty hotel manager-mistress and Kerr the daughter of a traveling elderly poet stopping at Gardner’s Mexican resort hotel. Gardner burns up the screen with her boozing, dancing and laughter, Kerr tugs at the heartstrings as only she could. Neither moved Oscar voters enough to nominate their brilliant work.

SIDNEY POITIER in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), directed by Norman Jewison

Poitier knew he’d never have a better year than he had in 1967 with three back-to-back box- office smash hits, To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Not one, but two of his male co-stars, Rod Steiger in Heat and Tracy in Dinner were nominated for Best Actor and were considered the favorites to win. Steiger did. Good sport Poitier opened the envelope containing the name of the Best Actress winner and revealed to the world that it was his other co-star, Katharine Hepburn. A nomination for Poitier as the Philadelphia detective reluctantly helping bigoted Southern sheriff Steiger solve a murder, was himself overlooked in the nominations. As he himself predicted, he never again had a year like this one, or even a another film that came close to the success of these three.

ROBERT RYAN in THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973), directed by John Frankenheimer

Ryan received his only Oscar nomination early in his career for his anti-Semitic solider in 1947’s Crossfire and gave many memorable performances in the intervening years, none more poignant than his last role as a dying man made when he himself knew he would soon die of cancer. This version of Eugene O’Neill’s masterwork was the last film for both him and Fredric March. He won numerous critics’ awards and nominations for his performance as co-lead to Lee Marvin but Oscar failed to follow suit.

MAX VON SYDOW in THE EXORCIST (1973), directed by William Friedkin

The Golden Globes nominated von Sydow for his supporting role as the title character, the elderly priest who literally battle Satan with his last breath. With his starring role in Jan Troell’s The New Land also bidding for attention this year, Oscar nevertheless failed to follow the Globes and nominated playwright-actor Jason Miller as his fellow priest instead. Von Sydow had to wait for 1988’s Pelle the Conqueror to earn his first Oscar nomination and has only been nominated once since for 2011’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

MERYL STTREEP in THE HOURS (2002), directed by Stpehen Daldry

Streep was one of three stars of the film version of Michael Cunningham’s best-seller. Nicole Kidman had the showiest part as author Virginia Woolf, but Julianne Moore as a 19560s housewife and Streep as a contemporary publisher are equally important to the story. All give fine performances. With Moore an expected Best Actress nominee for Far from Heaven it was anticipated that she would be nominated in support for this while Kidman and Streep battled it out for Best Actress. She was. Streep, however, was nominated in support for Adaptation and not nominated for her equally affecting performance in The Hours.