Golden-age Hollywood promoted glamour all year long and then, when it came to the Oscars, rewarded antiglamour. To understand the Academy’s prejudice against its richest resource, consider that by 1941, Walter Brennan — who specialized in playing cunning, toothless galoots — had won three Oscars, while Cary Grant had not even been nominated. By then Grant had starred in The Awful Truth, Topper, Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings and The Philadelphia Story — fashioning the indelible template of the attractive, self-deprecating movie male, and doing it with superb comic timing or action-adventure gruffness, as the role demanded. In His Girl Friday he’s a ruthless newspaper editor who browbeats his writer-wife (Rosalind Russell), all other journalists, the city’s mayor and cops and a condemned killer just because … he’s Cary Grant. It’s a fast, gorgeous comic turn, for which Grant got no nomination. He would be cited for two dramatic performances, in Penny Serenade and None but the Lonely Heart, yet Hollywood’s greatest comic actor was never nominated for a comedy role.
