The film’s premiere in September 1954 was attended by enormous critical enthusiasm. It generated some of the best reviews Garland had ever received, reviews that recognized both the quality of the film itself and the significance of her return to film after four years of concert performance and professional uncertainty. The Oscar nomination that followed was not a consolation prize; it was a recognition that her performance was one of the best performances in film of that year, which it was.
That Grace Kelly won for The Country Girl — a film that also featured a woman dealing with a husband’s alcoholism and professional decline, in an interesting structural parallel — has been cited as one of the Academy’s more debatable decisions in the Best Actress category. The records of the voting are private, and attributing the outcome to any specific cause is speculative. What is not speculative is that Garland’s performance in A Star Is Born stands as what the Academy Award was designed to recognize.
The financial outcome of the film was a separate matter from its artistic achievement. The production had cost significantly more than originally budgeted — estimates in the range of five to six million dollars were cited in contemporary reports — and the studio’s decision to cut approximately thirty minutes from the film after its premiere both reduced its artistic coherence and did not produce the commercial improvement that was apparently hoped for. The restoration undertaken in the 1980s, which assembled surviving footage from various sources to reconstruct the extended version, was itself a recognition that what had been cut had value.