The only person to have ever won an Oscar without even being nominated
Winning an Academy Award is viewed as a career peak for anyone working in the film industry, but one winner was so steadfast in their belief that they deserved the prize that they ended up leaving the ceremony with the trophy under their arm despite not even being nominated.
Directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle may have seen their adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play disappoint at the box office, but in addition to landing a nomination for ‘Best Picture’ and winning the prize for ‘Best Film Editing’, 1935’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream wound up making Oscars history.
Cinematographer Hal Mohr was left so aghast at the fact he hadn’t made the shortlist for ‘Best Cinematography’ that he mounted a grassroots campaign to see his name added to the ballot, a method that proved so ingeniously successful that it also changed the rules of the ceremony forevermore.
Ray June, Victor Milner, and Gregg Toland were the trio of candidates vying for the Oscar after being recognised for Barbary Coast, The Crusades, and Les Misérables respectively, but Mohr simply couldn’t sanction the idea of being ignored for his own work.
Mounting a write-in campaign, Mohr encouraged a huge number of voters to send his name to the Academy, lending their support and backing to his lensing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he ended up emerging victorious to become the first – and still only – Oscar winner that wasn’t even nominated.
As a direct result, the rules were changed to outlaw write-in voting so that the same situation would never unfold again, but Mohr already had his ‘Best Cinematography’ statue by that point, so it’s not as if he would have been too devastated at the opportunity for lightning to strike twice being banned.
That didn’t prevent him from making Oscars history again, either, after he set another benchmark eight years later when he shared a win in the same category with W. Howard Greene for 1943’s The Phantom of the Opera, making him the first person to snag an Oscar for both black-and-white and colour cinematography.
Campaigning has become an increasingly important part of the Oscars process as studios, production companies, and executives throw millions of dollars at marketing and promotion to position themselves with the best chance of beating out the competition, but Mohr endures as the only person to have mobilised his peers and contemporaries with a hand-written movement that yielded the best possible outcome from his perspective.
It must have been a real kick in the teeth for the other contenders, though, who all believed they had a one-in-three chance of winning an Oscar before Mohr came along with a sneaky plan that ended up reaping massive rewards when the non-nominated cinematographer had his name read out.
