Joan Crawford was not nominated.
This is a fact that deserves its own paragraph, because the narrative of the rivalry has sometimes blurred it. Crawford was in the film. Crawford was, by the film’s logic, as central as Davis. But Crawford had not been nominated, and Davis had. The Academy’s decision to nominate Davis but not Crawford for their shared film established the specific asymmetry that the rest of the story depends on.
Crawford later told multiple interviewers that she felt Davis received the nomination because Davis had campaigned for it and Crawford had not. Whether this is accurate—whether the Academy’s voting membership was moved by lobbying as much as by performance—is not something the historical record can establish. Academy voting then and now depends on the individual judgments of thousands of members, and those judgments are never made fully transparent.
What the nomination record tells us is that five thousand or so Academy members, voting within their branches on nominations and across the membership on final awards, gave Davis a nomination and not Crawford. Whether that outcome reflects anything about Crawford’s performance relative to Davis’s, or reflects factors outside the film itself, is ultimately a matter of interpretation.
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THE CAMPAIGN THAT DAVIS SAID HAPPENED
Here is where the story enters its most disputed territory.
After the nominations were announced, Bette Davis reportedly began receiving signals—through industry channels, through the conversational machinery of Hollywood’s social world—that Joan Crawford was working against her. Davis later told biographers, most significantly through accounts that appear in Shaun Considine’s 1989 book *Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud*, that Crawford had been contacting members of the Academy and urging them not to vote for Davis.