Davis’s nomination was itself a significant acknowledgment. *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* is not the kind of film that typically produces Academy Award nominations for acting. The film won only one Oscar—Best Costume Design, Black-and-White, for Norma Koch. Davis’s nomination for Best Actress, in this context, represents a recognition that her performance had crossed a threshold of critical legitimacy that the film’s genre might otherwise have prevented.
She was nominated. She was not overlooked. She did not win. These are different outcomes, and they should be kept clearly separate.
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JOAN CRAWFORD AT THE MICROPHONE: THE VISIBLE RECORD
Footage from the 35th Academy Awards ceremony exists and has been available through the Academy’s archives and through the official Oscars YouTube channel. What it shows—what can be directly observed rather than reconstructed from later accounts—is Crawford at the microphone, accepting the award, speaking briefly, and exiting the stage.
Whatever her expression communicated to those in the auditorium that night, whatever Bette Davis’s interpretation of that expression was, whatever the expression actually reflected in terms of Crawford’s interior experience—these are things that subsequent accounts have described and analyzed in terms that should be understood as interpretation rather than documentation. We can observe a woman accepting an award gracefully. We cannot observe her motivations.
Davis said Crawford wore “a radiant smile.” Subsequent accounts have described her body language as triumphant, as deliberately visible, as a performance within the performance of the evening. These are readings applied to an image, and they carry the freight of everything that has been written about the rivalry. A neutral observer who knew nothing about the Crawford-Davis history, watching the same footage, might see a well-dressed actress accepting an award graciously on behalf of an absent colleague.