RULE CHANGES
· "Original Screenplay" added.
· Interior Decoration divided into separate Black and White and Color categories.
· The Academy finally agreed to sealed envelopes. No more leaking before Awards night.

ROLE REVERSALS
· Laurence Olivier won the role of Max de Winter in Rebecca only after William Powell and Ronald Colman took a pass.
· Ginger Rogers always bristled at the mention of Katharine Hepburn, feeling she should have been offered more of Hepburn's roles. She got her revenge when Hepburn turned down Rogers's Oscar®-winning part in Kitty Foyle. Hepburn later told reporters, "I was offered Kitty Foyle and I didn't want to play a soap opera about a shopgirl." Hepburn added, "Ginger was wonderful, she's enormously talented and she deserved the Oscar. As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work."

SINS OF OMISSION
Picture: His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, Waterloo Bridge, The Shop Around the Corner
Actor: Cary Grant in His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story
Actress: Rosalind Russell - His Girl Friday, Margaret Sullavan - The Shop Around the Corner
Song: "I Concentrate on You," "I Hear Music," "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have"

ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID... Hitchcock didn't win Best Director this year -- or any other, despite five more nominations. He received a Thalberg in 1968.

UNMENTIONABLES
· Jimmy Stewart's Oscar® was considered a gold-plated apology for his being robbed of the award for last year's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
· Academy president Walter Wanger presented emcee Bob Hope with a special humaniarian award during the ceremony. Genuinely moved, Hope was speechless, finally saying, "I don't feel a bit funny. It's a kick -- it's a beautiful thing."
· The Academy was proud that it had obtained the highly regarded British war correspondent Quentin Reynolds to give out the writing Awards. Reynolds had produced a one-reel short nominee, London Can Take It. After it had lost to Pete Smith's demonstration of high-speed photography, Quicker'n a Wink, Reynolds used the dais to give his acceptance speech anyway. He said he understood "why Hollywood and the Academy had engaged Mr. Price and Mr. Waterhouse to count the ballots. No one in the movie colony could count to up to 12,000. Yes, there are a couple of producers who could count that high -- but not in English."
· Original Story winner Benjamin Glazer revealed that John S. Toldy, his collaborator on the story for Arise, My Love, was a pseudonym. Glazer added that "Toldy" was currently in Nazi Germany and he could not risk jeopardizing his partner's life by divulging his true identity to the guests at the Biltmore. (See Hans Székely)
· Best Screenplay winner Donald Ogden Stewart stammered, "I envy the boys who get the Technical Awards. They don't have to get nervously drunk before. There has been so much niceness here tonight, that I am happy to say that I am entirely -- and solely -- responsible for the success of The Philadelphia Story."
· Frank Capra called the nominated directors to the podium to shake hands for jobs well done. They were all there, except John Ford -- who had written that he and Henry Fonda would be in a boat off the coast of Mexico "for as long as the fish are biting." While the losing directors crawled back to their tables, Capra had to have been remembering his own humiliation seven years earlier.
· Prior to the announcement of the Best Picture Award, none of the nominated films had won more than one Oscar®, so last-minute bets were made right up to the opening of the envelope.
· As Walter Brennan was receiving his unexpected third Award for Best Supporting Actor, nominee and favorite Jack Oakie told friends that Brennan won because the extras always voted for him out of loyalty since he had come from their ranks.
· After the Awards, Fox studio flacks told the press that in the past seven months Jane Darwell had worked at the studio for 21 weeks and an additional month on loan-out to Warners. Zanuck personally called her on the day after the Awards to offer her a co-starring role in Private Nurse.
· The filming of The Letter was laced with irony. The previous year, director William Wyler had sent his lover, Bette Davis, an ultimatum letter: either drop her husband and marry him or it was over. She didn't write back.
· Ginger Rogers's joined-at-the-hip relationship with her domineering mom, Lela, proved eternal. They're buried side by side at Oakwood Memorial Park. The grave of Ginger's longtime screen partner, Fred Astaire, is just yards away.