The Best Picture Oscar nominees of 1936 contained a few stone-cold classics and a large handful of duds. The Academy nominated 10 films for Best Picture that year, with the top honor going to Robert Z. Leonard's three-hour glitzy musical biopic "The Great Ziegfeld" (a film about noted musical theater impresario Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld, Jr., as played by William Powell). "The Great Ziegfeld" is visually spectacular but kind of mushy as a melodrama, serving more as a fond farewell to its subject (who died in 1932) than a legitimately great film.

The legit bangers nominated that year included Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," one of the master director's more notable comedies. Also pretty good were William Dieterle's "The Story of Lois Pasteur" starring Paul Muni, and Jack Conway's delightful screwball film "Libeled Lady" with Powell and Myrna Loy. Conway also directed a serviceable adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities," which many readers may have watched in their junior high school classrooms.

But 1936 also had a lot of stinkers at the Oscars. One might think that George Cukor directing a production of "Romeo and Juliet" would go over well, but leads Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer were too old to play the star-crossed lovers, and the director was a little too fond of Andy Devine (!) as a random servant named Peter. Henry Koster's "Three Smart Girls" is fine, but it's hardly extraordinary, and the disaster epic "San Francisco" doesn't really start to get lively until the 1906 earthquake strikes at the end of the movie.

At the bottom of the barrel, at least critically, were William Wyler's ultra-dull captain-of-industry drama "Dodsworth" and Mervyn LeRoy's historical epic "Anthony Adverse." The latter also has the dubious honor of being the lowest-approved Best Picture nominee on Rotten Tomatoes, with a rating of only 18%.