25th Academy Awards

Awards

Nominees were announced on February 9, 1953. Winners are listed first and highlighted in boldface.^[6]

Best Special Effects

• Plymouth Adventure – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Honorary Foreign Language Film Award

• To Forbidden Games (France) - Best Foreign Language Film first released in the United States during 1952.

Honorary Awards

• To George Alfred Mitchell for the design and development of the camera which bears his name and for his continued and dominant presence in the field of cinematography.
• To Joseph M. Schenck for long and distinguished service to the motion picture industry.
• To Merian C. Cooper for his many innovations and contributions to the art of motion pictures.
• To Harold Lloyd, master comedian and good citizen.
• To Bob Hope for his contribution to the laughter of the world, his service to the motion picture industry, and his devotion to the American premise.

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award

• Cecil B. DeMille

Presenters

Performers

Broadcast

The 25th Academy Awards ceremony was the first to be broadcast on television:^[1] For the first time in history, a television audience estimated at 40,000,000 persons^[7] will watch the movie industry's biggest show. It will mark the TV debut for scores of the biggest names in moviedom.

The telecast was prompted by the need to finance the bi-coastal ceremony. When three of the film studios refused to provide their customary financial support, the RCA Victor Division of the Radio Corporation of America agreed to pay AMPAS $100,000 (one source reported $250,000^[8]) as a sponsorship fee. NBC telecast the bicoastal ceremony over its 64-station television network and on its 174-station radio system.^[5] The Armed Forces Radio Service recorded the proceedings for later broadcast.^[5]

The show was broadcast from 10:30 p.m. to 12:15 a.m. EST (7:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. PST),^[9][10][11] switching back and forth from host Bob Hope on the West Coast to Conrad Nagel on the East Coast. The late start was made to accommodate those nominees who were performing that night on the Broadway stage.^[11]

The technology used for television at the time meant that Bob Hope had to wear a blue dress shirt with his formal dinner jacket;^[12] the traditional white shirt would have been too bright.

Notable achievements

The year saw a major upset when the heavily favored High Noon lost Best Picture to Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, eventually considered among the worst films to have won the award.^[13][14] Today, it ranks #94 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the 95 films to win Best Picture, ahead of only The Broadway Melody.^[15]

Although it only received two nominations, Singin' in the Rain went on to be named as the greatest American musical film of all time and in the 2007 American Film Institute updated list as the fifth greatest American film of all time, while High Noon ranked twenty-seventh on the same list.

The Bad and the Beautiful won five Oscars, the most wins ever for a film not nominated for Best Picture. It was also the second—and, to date, last—Academy Awards in which a film not nominated for Best Picture received the most awards of the evening, excluding years where there were ties for the most wins.

Until Spotlight won only Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards, this was the last year in which the Best Picture winner won just two total Oscars. It was also the second of three years to date in which two films not nominated for Best Picture received more nominations than the winner (The Bad and the Beautiful and Hans Christian Andersen, both with six). This occurred again at the 79th Academy Awards.

Shirley Booth was the last person born in the 19th century to win an Oscar in a Leading Role, and the first woman in her 50s to win Best Actress, at the age of 54 (the second woman in her 50s to win, Julianne Moore, was also 54 when she won at the 87th Academy Awards).

John Ford's fourth win for Best Director set a record for the most wins in this category that remains unmatched to this day. For the first time since the introduction of Supporting Actor and Actress awards in 1936, Best Picture, Best Director, and all four acting Oscars were awarded to six different films. This has happened only three times since, at the 29th Academy Awards for 1956, the 78th for 2005, and the 85th for 2012.