Prize Nights

With no apparent embarrassment, the cinema last week indicated its conviction that the people who see moving pictures deserve bigger and better prizes than the people who make them.

In Hollywood, at the annual banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, prizes were distributed to the people who make moving pictures. Highest Academy awards are small, gilt statuettes, which, according to newspaper legend, everyone in Hollywood always calls "Oscars." Last week's banquet, the Academy's eleventh, was attended by 1,250 of the Academy's 12,000 members, whose votes determine the winners.

For the first time in Academy history, all three major winners were repeaters. To Bette Davis, who got her first statuette in 1935 for Dangerous, went a second for her 1938 performance in Jezebel. To Spencer Tracy, who got a statuette last year for Captains Courageous, went a second for his 1938 performance as Father Flanagan in Boys Town. Director Frank Capra, the Academy's president since 1935, last week became Hollywood's only holder of three Academy statuettes when he got another for You Can't Take It With You (others: It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), which Academy members also voted the best production of the year.

In San Francisco. The notion that cinemaddicts are prizeworthy dawned on the industry suddenly last summer. As part of its $1,000,000 advertising campaign run by Donahue & Coe, to convince the public that "Motion Pictures Are Your Best Entertainment," theatres all over the U.S. and Canada distributed to their patrons booklets containing questions based on 94 forthcoming pictures and theoretically answerable only by people who saw the pictures. First prize in this colossal quiz, which ended last December 31. was $50,000. Other prizes totaled $200,000 more. The quiz was a comparative flop. Hoping for 5,000,000 answers, the Committee received less than half that many. Last week, four days after the Academy dinner, theatre managers all over the country distributed the industry's largesse. In San Francisco's Fox Theatre the $50,000 first prize went to Mrs. Elizabeth C. Benincasa, who, like many other contestants, had answered all the quiz questions correctly. She won because she had written the best accompanying essay called for by the rules. Second prize, $25,000, went to a Mrs. Laura W. Carpenter in Loew's Theatre, Akron, Ohio.

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