A Dog Could Have Won the First Academy Award

With this year's Academy Awards coming up, it's been a wild and unpredictable awards season thus far, which is a feat considering how predictable the Oscars tend to be year after year, with a few notable exceptions (looking at you Parasite). But what if I were to tell you that the Oscars used to be so unpredictable that they could have given their first award to a German Shepherd dog? It's not that simple, so maybe let's go back to the beginning.

Like many things in old Hollywood, all this trouble came about due to sometimes-hero-sometimes-villain Louis B. Mayer, movie producer and founder of MGM Studios. He wanted to create an organization that could improve the film industry's PR image (hero) and mediate labor disputes without involving unions (villain). After an initial meeting with a few interested individuals, Mayer invited thirty-six entertainment industry professionals to become the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in January 1927.

Once their concerns moved away from meddling in labor disputes, the Academy had decided to host an annual gala to celebrate themselves and hand out "Awards of Merit" in twelve categories based on five branches of profession: producers, actors, directors, writers, and technicians. However, not everyone involved was onboard right away. Writers branch member Frank Woods tried to entice Warner Bros executive Darryl Zanuck to champion the project. Thinking the idea of handing out trophies to the "best" movies a ridiculous notion, Zanuck wrote a letter back to Woods satirically describing who he would nominate for such an awards ceremony. His vote for Best Actor: Rin Tin Tin.

You may be asking yourself, "Who is Rin Tin Tin?" If you were to ask that question in 1927, you would have been laughed at mercilessly. He was quite possibly the highest grossing star of 1920s cinema. He also just happened to be a dog.

Rin Tin Tin was rescued as a one-week-old German Shepherd puppy in France during World War I and later trained as a police dog before being cast in movies to portray savior dogs or half-wolf wild animals. By the end of 1927, he had appeared in seventeen hit films, most of which were produced by none other than Darryl Zanuck. Rin Tin Tin is credited as having saved Warner Bros from bankruptcy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Zanuck had his star on the brain when talks of a film industry awards banquet came up.

After not seriously suggesting his canine star to be worthy of the Best Actor award, Zanuck continued his work at Warner Bros. However, despite his protestations, the Academy Awards were off and running a year later, and by happenstance, his boss Jack Warner was one of the original voting members of the Academy, who just so happened to hear about Zanuck's Rin Tin Tin quip. Whether as a joke or trying to elevate the status of his four-legged thespian, Warner himself voted for the dog in the first ever Best Actor category.

It is at this point that I must confess the truth is clouded in murky history.

The 1928 ballots are currently in a storage box at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, and the only one suggesting a win for any animal is Warner's. With only one vote, the title of this article appears to be misleading. However, in 2020, it took 221 votes to be nominated for an acting Oscar out of 1,324 voters. Adjusted for the original members of the Academy, all it would take to be nominated in 1928 was six votes and not much more than that to win. It would have required a mild campaign from Warner to gather five extra votes from his peers; considering the millions spent campaigning today, I'd say that would have been money well spent. But those six-plus votes went to three other actors, and the rest is history.

Or is it?

According to Susan Orlean, while researching her 2011 biography on Rin Tin Tin, she came across a Hollywood legend told verbally throughout the twentieth century. Rin Tin Tin actually had received the most votes for Best Actor in 1928, but the Academy feared ridicule for selecting a dog as the first recipient of the award, so they recalled the ballots and collectively agreed upon a different winner, Emil Jannings, who received the first award of the ceremony. Therefore, had Rin Tin Tin actually been selected, a dog would have been the very first Academy Award winner.

Unfortunately, this story has no evidence to support it, as the only ballots known to exist from that ceremony are the ones described earlier, and none of the original Academy founding members are alive to ask.

Who's to say what is truth and what is exaggeration? However, it can't be ignored that, even with the facts we do know, Rin Tin Tin had a viable chance of being not only the first acting Oscar winner but the first winner of the most prestigious award in the Hollywood ever.