All the Oscar books, which I owned as well, were written decades after the first awards. I'm not sure how well researched they were. I know that Damien and Mason did their job meticulously, but there were errors that Damien told me were mainly the result of erroneous submissions of ineligible films which they had access to rather than contradictory entries in differing books on the subject.
It was long after Inside Oscar that the changes now blessed by the Academy was made. Tom O'Neill's Movie Awards from 2003, which Damien hated I know, but it was a good reference work in its own right, also included
The Last Command and
The Way of All Flesh among Best Picture nominees.
I don't know if 2010 was when the changes were made or not, but that seems to be about when people started digging more thoroughly into contemporaneous reports. As I pointed out, the original press release in the Los Angles Times in early 1929 did not mention those two films. It's from the actual print edition which you can access with a prescription. You can get a trial subscription for seven days without paying if you want to check this or anything else out in the entire history of the Los Angeles Times or many other newspapers.
Searched:
https://www.newspapers.com/image/385554 ... s=Jannings
Found:
The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California)18 Feb 1929, Mon Page 17
I don't know what the Margaret Herrick library has on hand. Perhaps they have more detailed information such as the submissions that led to the final selections. Those three in each category that earned a statuette or a certificate were all considered winners. The nominees would have been the submissions or if you like, the five to ten submissions that got the most mention.
If want to read an Oscar book that is will really have you pulling your hair out, pick up a copy of Irish Professor Aubrey Malone's "And the Loser is..."
On the plus side, he generously quotes our Damien and John Harkness, but those typos, if that's what they are, should have been caught by someone in the editing process.
Among some very choice entries are The husband and wife nominations for Joel Coen and Frances McDormand for 1996's
Fargo came
almost twenty years after the last time a husband and wife team were nominated in the same year. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands were nominated for 1974's
A Woman Under the Influence. Was he drunk, or can't he count? 1996 was was 22 years later than 1974, not almost twenty.
Among the actors John Wayne beat in 1969 were Richard Burton for
Anne of the Thousand Days and Peter O'Toole for
The Lion in Winter. This several pages after discussing O'Toole in
The Lion in Winter in the previous year's analysis.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips was 1969.
And my absolute favorite:
Diane Keaton won the Oscar for
Annie Hall but she should have won for
Looking for Mr. Goodbar in which she played a serial killer.
I agree that Keaton should won for
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, not
Annie Hall, but I saw the movie and like anyone else who has seen it I know that she played the victim of a serial killer, not the serial killer. Did he see the movie or is he picking up on someone else's opinion?