am i the only one who thinks the actor who plays shelldrake deserved the oscar even more than the one who plays the doc?

That was Fred MacMurray, just coming off the first of his many Disney movies -- The Shaggy Dog -- and about to be in an even bigger one -- The Absent Minded Professors -- and in between, rather shocking his fans with the casually cruel, utterly uncaring big boss swine, Sheldrake.

Jack Kruschen has the "nice guy" role in The Apartment, urging Jack Lemmon to stop whatever it is he is doing and becoming a mensch. Kruschen WAS a supporting actor, his whole life long.

Fred MacMurray was a star, a leading man of sorts, when he did The Apartment.

MacMurray certainly deserved some sort of nomination for The Apartment, but there weren't many to go around in 1960. There aren't in any year. 1960 was also the year that Anthony Perkins was snubbed of even a nomination for Norman Bates in Psycho...after (oops) predicting in the trades that he WOULD be nominated.

OK...let's give fading star Fred MacMurray the Oscar nom given to Jack Kruschen. He's incredibly important to the pain that is central to Lemmon's life AND MacLaine's life...and he doesn't even care.

PS. Disney guy MacMurray played a few other bad guys -- a murderer for "Apartment" director Billy Wilder(in Double Indemnity) -- where even as a killer, he's a nicer guy than Sheldrake! And in The Caine Mutiny, he's the guy he taunts everybody else into the mutiny and sneaks away from the deed when it is done. Pure swine, again.

PPS. The Apartment came out the same year that My Three Sons started as a TV series. Then the Disney movie jackpots. Fred MacMurray was on a roll!