Oscar Profile: Oscar Loves Christmas

While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won a Best Picture Oscar, one film in which the holiday is prominently featured did win the big prize. That was 1960’s bittersweet comedy, The Apartment, which takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Kruschen were nominated for their performances and the film won five of the ten it was nominated for, including Best Picture, Director (Billy Wilder) and Original Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond).

A more recent winner, 2018’s Green Book features a climax built around getting home for Christmas but is not specifically built around the holiday. 2023’s The Holdovers is the last Best Picture nominee to date in which the film is very much about the holiday.

The first film in which Christmas plays a prominent role to be nominated for Best Picture was 1933’s Little Women, the first of four to earn Oscar nominations and the first to win one.

The first built entirely around the holiday to be nominated was 1934’s The Thin Man starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in the first of a series of films they starred in through 1947 in which they played married couple Nick and Nora Charles who solve murders in a comedy mode.

It wasn’t until 1946 that a film that centers on the holiday itself was nominated for Best Picture. That film was, of course, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life in which James Stewart is guided by his guardian angel (Henry Travers) to see what the world would have bene like if he never existed, a modest hit in its day, now amongst almost everyone’s list of favorite films of all time.

The following year two Christmas movies, Henry Koster’s The Bishop’s Wife starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven about an angel come to Earth and George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street starring Maureen O’Hara, John Payne and Oscar winner Edmund Gwenn as the real Santa Claus, were nominated for Best Picture. Koster’s Come to the Stable two years later earned a sizeable haul of nominations, seven in all, including acting nods for Loretta Young and Celeste Holm as French nuns and Elsa Lanchester as one of their benefactors, but missed out on a Best Picture nomination.

Anthony Harvey’s 1968 film, The Lion in Winter, starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn as bickering 12th Century British royals was the last film centered around Christmas that was nominated for Best Picture. It won three of its seven nods include Hepburn’s third award for Best Actress.

Significant Oscar nominated films in which the holiday is either fully featured or plays a major part in the film include 1933’s Little Women and its subsequent remakes, 1938’s A Christmas Carol and its various remakes, 1941’s Meet John Doe, 1942’s Holiday Inn, 1944’s Going My Way (the first with major Christmas scenes to win) and Meet Me in St. Louis, 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1954’s White Christmas, 1958’s Auntie Mame, 1970’s Scrooge (the first version of A Christmas Carol recognized by AMPAS), 1987’s The Dead, and 2015’s Brooklyn.

In addition to the thirty-three Oscar nominated films listed at the end of this article, there have been many unforgettable films that celebrate the holiday that went without Oscar nominations. Here are a few of them:

ESSENTIAL CHRISTMAS FILMS WITHOUT OSCAR NOMINATIONS

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940), directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Legend has it that Christmas movies are supposed to open no later than Thanksgiving because once the holiday passes, people are no longer interested in seeing them until the holiday draws near again. The Shop Around the Corner defied the legend, opening days apart in January. Stars James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan were at their peak as the assistant manager and clerk who can’t stand each other on the job but are secret pen pals outside of work. It was remade as the musical, In the Good Old Summertime in which the holiday completely disappears, then as the Broadway musical She Loves Me and once again on screen as You’ve Got Mail.

REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940), directed by Mitchell Leisen

Opening a few days after The Shop Around the Corner, Remember the Night also defied the convention of not opening a holiday film after the holiday passes. Four years before Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray starred in the first great film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, they were a shoplifter on parole and the D.A. who convicted her, now responsible for her until after New Year’s in this charmer that features great character work from Beulah Bondi and Elizabeth Patterson as MacMurray’s mother and spinster aunt, and Sterling Holloway as a family friend.

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1945), directed by Peter Godfrey

Stanwyck again, this time playing a Good Housekeeping-like writer who can’t cook, but whose scrumptious meals, which are the work of chef S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, entice magazine publisher Sydney Greenstreet to invite himself to her “house” for Christmas. Dennis Morgan plays the soldier recuperating from being lost as sea who is also invited for the holiday. Reginald Gardiner plays Stanwyck’s longtime fiancée who owns the house she calls hers. Una O’Connor is Gardiner’s exasperated cook at odds with Sakall who Stanwyck has brought along to do her cooking.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hurst

The definitive version of Dickens’ tale of the miserly businessman who is forced to relive his life by the visit of the ghost of his former partner and three other apparitions on Christmas Eve features a priceless lead performance by Alastair Sim as Scrooge. The film’s lack of Oscar recognition is primarily due to poor marketing. Just a modest hit when first released, it didn’t become a major success until it started appearing on TV later in the decade where audiences could enjoy it as it dueled for viewers’ attention with the almost as good 1938 starring Reginald Owen, a replacement for Lionel Barrymore who played the role for years on radio.

LOVE ACTUALLY (2003), directed by Richard Curtis

“Love Is All Around” sings Bill Nighy, and so it is in London in the month leading up to Christmas affecting everyone from the new Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) to his sister (Emma Thompson) to her husband (Alan Rickman) to Rickman’s employee (Laura Linney) to a writer (Colin Firth) to newlyweds (Chiwitel Ejiofor, Keira Knightley) and their best man (Andrew Lincoln) to a recent widower (Liam Neeson) and his son (Thomas Brodie-Sangster). BAFTA nominated the film for Best British Film, Best Supporting Actress (Thompson), and gave their Best Supporting Actor award to Nighy.

CHRISTMAS AND OSCAR

Little Women (1933) – three nominations – one win

The Thin Man (1934) – four nominations – no wins

Meet John Doe (1941) – one nomination – no win

Holiday Inn (1942) – three nominations – one win

Going My Way (1944) – ten nominations – seven wins

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) – four nominations – no wins

The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) – eight nominations – one win

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) – two nominations – one win

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – five nominations – no wins

The Bishop’s Wife (1947) – five nominations – one win

It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947) – one nomination – one win