31 Days of Oscar is back!

I'm sure some of you are oh so excited! Tomorrow being February 1, TCM is bringing back its annual 31 Days of Oscar salute, with each movie being nominated for at least one Academy Award. Actually, not quite, since they're going to be premiering a new documentary about the Oscars. But to be fair, I'd presume that documentary is going to have some clips of films that were nominated, or footage from vintage awards ceremonies. Anyhow, I'm mentioning 31 Days of Oscar a bit early because the subject of this post deals with movies that are airing early tomorrow morning.

This year, TCM is programming 31 Days of Oscar by having prime time look at the nominees in one particular category in a given year. I don't know if every prime time has every single nominee, although I'd presume that TCM tried to get all of them. February 1's prime time lineup looks at the Best Picture nominees from 1939. Of course, back then there were 10 nominees for Best Picture in a given year, a procedure which was discuontinued after 1943 when the number of nominees was reduced to five; it was of course increased a few years back to a maximum of ten, although the Academy doesn't have to nominate ten if they don't wish to. But with ten nominees, and one of them being the four-hour Gone With the Wind, there's no way TCM could fit them all in a ten-hour prime time block. So TCM is spending almost all 24 hours tomorrow with the nominees of 1939, starting at 6:00 AM with Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with a break at 8:00 PM for that documentary that I mentioned.