Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers In 1934, Astaire and Rogers made the musical movie "The Gay Divorcee" which co-starred Edward Everett Horton; it was their first joint starring role in a movie and grossed even more with worldwide rentals of $1.8 million; the movie also featured the classic Cole Porter song "Night and Day". The song "The Continental" from the movie was a hit and was also the first song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song in the 1934 Academy Awards. Astaire and Rogers made two movies in 1935, "Roberta", which featured the song "I Won't Dance" and "Top Hat", which also
Academy Award for Best Original Song "Once". However, the AMPAS music committee determined that, in the course of the film's protracted production, the composers had "played the song in some venues that were deemed inconsequential enough to not change the song's eligibility". The same issue arose two years earlier with "In the Deep" from "Crash", which appeared on Bird York's 2003 album "The Velvet Hour" after being written for "Crash", but before the film was released. The current Academy rule says an eligible song "must be recorded for use in the motion picture prior to any other usage", so recordings released prior to the film will