The Academy Awards were still evolving in their fifth year, which honored films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1931 and July 31, 1932.

This year there were twelve competitive categories with eight films nominated for Best Picture but only three nominees each in the remaining categories, including three devoted to short films, split between cartoons, comedy and novelty.

The Best Picture Oscar went to MGM’s first all-star extravaganza, Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel from Vicki Baum’s novel about guests at the famed Berlin hotel. Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone and Jean Hersholt headed the cast.

Its competition included John Ford’s Arrowsmith with Ronald Colman as the crusading doctor and Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy as his two wives; Frank Borzage’s Bad Girl in which Sally Eilers is decidedly a good girl married to the equally good James Dunn; King Vidor’s The Champ with Wallace Beery as the over-the-hill prizefighter and Jackie Cooper as his adoring son: Mervyn LeRoy’s fast-paced newspaper story, Five Star Final with Edward G. Robinson as the editor and Aline MacMahon as his faithful secretary; Josef von Sternberg’s intrigue filled Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich, for whom it took more than one man to change her name to “Shanghai Lil”, along with Clive Brook, Anna May Wong and Warner Oland; and two Ernst Lubitsch musicals: One Hour With You with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald and The Smiling Lieutenant with Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins. Unlike the prior Oscar year, all of these films were both popular and critical hits.

All but Five Star Final and Shanghai Express are available on DVD. Five Star Final is owned by Warner Bros. so it will likely eventually be released as part of the Warner Archive. Rights to Shanghai Express belong to Universal, which previously released it on VHS and in non-U.S. markets on DVD. Why it still hasn’t had a U.S. DVD release remains a mystery.

Although this was a strong roster, Oscar still managed to come up short by denying Best Picture nods to the year’s three instant classics: Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; James Whale’s Frankenstein and Howard Hawks’ Scarface.

Dr.Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography, but it lost the former to Bad Girl and the latter to Shanghai Express. It did, of course, win Fredric March the first of his two Best Actor awards for his thrilling portrayal of the good doctor turned murderous fiend in the first talking film version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic. However, he was forced to share honors with Wallace Beery in The Champ.

Beery had actually come in three votes behind March, but the powers that be declared that was close enough for a tie.

Frankenstein and Scarface were completely shut out of the nominations. The former presumably wasn’t considered high brow enough, while the latter was considered too violent, having come under attack by various blue nose groups.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Frankenstein and Scarface are all available on DVD.

Among the other films that Oscar ignored were Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby; W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan the Ape Man; Tod Browning’s Freaks and Clarence Brown’s Emma.

As much an anti-war classic as The Big Parade and All Quiet on the Western Front, Broken Lullaby was Lubitsch’s only dramatic sound film. Phillips Holmes starred as the sensitive French soldier, a violinist in civilian life, who kills a German soldier he discovers to be a fellow violinist and sets out to make amends to the dead man’s family. Lionel Barrymore as the dead man’s father and Nancy Carroll as his fiancé have two of the best roles of their respective legendary careers. Alas, it has never been released on home video in the U.S.

The initial entry in one of the screen’s most enduring franchises, the Johnny Weismuller-Maureen O’Sullivan starrer, Tarzan the Ape Man,was not the first film to feature the legendary jungle man but it was certainly the most popular spawning eleven sequels with Weismuller, several of which also starred O’Sullivan who had an extensive career beyond the Tarzan movies.

Tarzan the Ape Man is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.

Freaks is as close to an exploitation film as a mainstream film can get. The story of traveling carnival sideshow freaks who turn on the vicious trapeze artist who taunts them is both a great revenge flick and an examination of lives among the truly different. Wallace Ford and Olga Baclanova star in the film that was heavily censored in the U.S. and banned in England for thirty years.

Freaks is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.

Marie Dressler followed her Oscar win of the previous year with another nod for Emma in which she plays the devoted family nanny and later housekeeper, then wife of millionaire Jean Hersholt who dies and leaves her all his money leading to a courtroom showdown with three of his four children. Richard Cromwell is a standout as her favorite, the one stepchild who stands by her. Myrna Loy has one of her last roles as a “heavy”.

Emma is available from the Warner Archive.

Helen Hayes made her stage debut in 1905 at the age of five and her first film in 1910 at the age of ten. Eventually dubbed The First Lady of the American Theatre, she had a starring screen career that lasted only from 1931 through 1935 after which she returned to the stage, appearing only intermittently in films and on TV in the 1950s and 60s, not becoming a regular screen presence until 1970 and her second Oscar for Airport.

The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she won her first Oscar, was an old warhorse of a tearjerker for which her husband Charles MacArthur and his writing partner, Ben Hecht, spruced up the dialogue, giving it what today would be considered camp appeal.

Hayes plays a society woman who goes to jail for a crime she did not commit and after she is released turns to prostitution and petty crimes to support her illegitimate son from afar. The son grows up to be Robert Young, the doctor who treats the now homeless old lady he doesn’t know is his mother. Hayes makes it work.

The film was previously released by Warner Bros. on VHS and will likely one day be released on DVD as part of the Warner Archive.

Like Hayes, the Lunts had a Broadway theatre named after them, The Lunt-Fontanne.

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were the American theatre’s most distinguished acting couple, appearing almost exclusively together from the 1920s through the 1960s, even winning Emmys for their performances in a splendid 1965 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Magnificent Yankee.

Both had made a few silent films, but their only talking film was 1932’s The Guardsman, from the Molnar play in which they had starred in eight years earlier, in which he is an actor who disguises himself as another man to fool his apparently nearsighted wife.

The suspension of disbelief it takes to enjoy that kind of fluff is lost on modern audiences. A 1984 remake, Lily in Love, with Christopher Plummer and Maggie Smith, was a huge critical and commercial flop, but in 1932 the material was liked well enough to get both of the Lunts nominated for Oscars, she losing to Hayes, he to both March and Beery.

The Guardsman is another film that was released by MGM on VHS and will likely eventually be released through the Warner Archive.

New releases worth checking out include the Blu-ray debuts of Dreamscape; Cocoon and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.