The first all-color film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.
This is widely considered to be the first Technicolor film that was a bona-fide critical and box office success. Until "A Star is Born" and "Nothing Sacred (1937)," color films had been garish, over-saturated and, as many critics complained, headache-inducing. Producer David O. Selznick insisted on muted, realistic color, and it was the success of these two films that paved the way for his Technicolor masterpiece "Gone with the Wind (1939)."
The Oscar that Janet Gaynor receives in the film is her own Oscar, which she won for her role in 7th Heaven (1927).
Early in the film, when Esther stops at Grauman's Chinese Theater to see the stars' footprints, the second one she visits is Harold Lloyd, which is to the right of Janet Gaynor's own prints from 1929, a portion which is visible on screen, including the "r" in her signature.
When this film was re-released in 1945 by Film Classics, it was not deemed important enough to be reprinted in Technicolor and so prints were struck in the less expensive and far inferior Cinecolor process and this was the only way it was to be seen for the next 30 years, until the Technicolor restoration in the 1970s.