What neither of them could predict, in those first weeks of theatrical release, was precisely what the Academy would do with the film.
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THE NOMINATING SEASON AND WHAT THE ACADEMY DECIDED
Academy Awards nominations for the 35th ceremony were announced on February 25, 1963. The announcement confirmed that Davis had been nominated for Best Actress—a recognition that the film’s box office success had made probable but not certain. The Academy’s record with horror and genre material had not been strong, and there was genuine uncertainty about whether Davis’s work in Baby Jane would be considered seriously.
The five nominees for Best Actress were:
– Anne Bancroft, *The Miracle Worker*
– Bette Davis, *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*
– Katharine Hepburn, *Long Day’s Journey into Night*
– Geraldine Page, *Sweet Bird of Youth*
– Lee Remick, *Days of Wine and Roses*
It was an unusually strong field. Bancroft had already won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her stage performance as Annie Sullivan—she had, in fact, performed the role hundreds of times on Broadway before making the film. Hepburn had delivered what many critics considered the finest work of her career in Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of the Eugene O’Neill play. Page was in the middle of a run of nominations that would define her as one of the great unrewarded talents in Oscar history. Remick had given a performance in Blake Edwards’s addiction drama that was raw and specific in ways the Academy occasionally rewarded.
Davis had the buzz. The film had made money. Her performance had been the subject of consistent commentary. But the Academy’s historical relationship with horror—and with films that explicitly engaged with camp or grotesque aesthetics—was not encouraging.