When Bing Crosby sings many people will go anyway he tells him to. So, Bing Crosby in Going My Way you know that everyone in the world came running in droves to the theater. Winner of the 17th Annual Academy Award for Best Picture, Going My Way is a musical drama that will have people singing the rest of the day. Release in 1944, it was proclaimed to be one of Bing Crosby's best roles. So much so that a sequel came out the next year with the same cast revising their roles.
Father Chuck O'Malley has come to New York, by order of the Parrish, to turn around one of the churches. The church is ran by Father Fitzgibbon, an old Irishman who built the church and has been running it ever since. With Father O'Malley's unorthodox way of bringing people together, and raising money for the church, Father Fitzgibbon has a hard time of warming up to him. However, when the congregation comes together and becomes stronger Father Fitzgibbon learns that change is not always a bad thing.
This is a very interesting year in the history of the Academy Awards because this was the first year that the number of movies to be nominated to the Best Picture Award went down from about 10 to 12 to 5. Meaning that because of the cut the prize of Best Picture was harder to obtain. However, that does not mean that the competition was any less still. In 1944 Going My Way had to beat out: Paramount's Double Indemnity, MGM's Gaslight, United Artists' Since You Went Away, and 20th Century Fox's Wilson. This film was nominated for a totally of 10 Academy Awards and won 7 of them. This film is also the only film in history where one of it's actors was nominated for their role in two categories. That would be Barry Fitzgerald's performance of Father Fitzgibbon. He was nominated in both Best Actor, which was won by Bing Crosby for his role in the movie, and Best Supporting Actor, which he did was for. After this incident the Academy changed the rules so that something like that would not happen again. This film was also selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2004.
I have to say that I really can not believe that such a lightweight of a movie won the award this yar. I mean don't get me wrong the movie was alright, and I have not seen the other films, but the rest of the films are considered real classics today. I don't believe I have even heard of this movie until I made the list. However, it seems that as good as this movie was it's doesn't seem at par with the other "light hearted" movies that have won the award over the year. A good example is The Sound of Music. The movie is light hearted but every time you watch it you know that you are watching something truly special. I just did not get any sort of feeling like that when I watched Going My Way. I will have to say that this will have to be one of those movies that I will forever question if the Academy got right...
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