| 11th Academy Awards | |
|---|---|
| Date | February 23, 1939 |
| Site | Biltmore Hotel |
| Highlights | |
| Best Picture | You Can't Take It with You |
| Most awards | The Adventures of Robin Hood (3) |
| Most nominations | You Can't Take it with You (7) |
The 11th Academy Awards were held on February 23, 1939, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California.[1] It was the first Academy Awards show without any official host. This was also the first ceremony in which a foreign language film (Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion) was nominated for Best Picture.
Frank Capra became the first person to win three Best Director awards, to be followed by John Ford (who would go on to win four) and William Wyler.
This was the first of only two times in Oscar history that three of the four acting awards were won by repeat winners; only Fay Bainter was a first-time award winner. The only other time that this happened was at the 67th Academy Awards in 1994. Fay Bainter also was the first actress in the history of the Oscars to receive two acting nominations in the same year. In addition, Spencer Tracy became the first of only two lead actors to win two years in a row; the other one, Tom Hanks, also did so in 1994. George Bernard Shaw's screenplay win would make him the only person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award until Bob Dylan received the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2001 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Radio coverage was banned at the 1939 ceremony. A reporter, George Fischer from Mutual Radio Network, KHJ, Los Angeles, which had been reporting from the Academy Awards since 1930, locked himself into a booth and was able to broadcast for about 12-minutes before security guards broke down the door. Partial radio coverage was permitted again at the 1942 ceremony.[2]
