Quiz

Barry Fitzgerald was nominated by the Academy for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards for the same performance, for the same film, the only time this has happened. (Al Pacino received a Best Supporting Actor nomination and a Best Actor nomination for his role as Michael Corleone, but his nominations were for the first and second Godfather films, respectively.). Fitzgerald won the Oscar in the supporting category but lost in the lead category to co-star Bing Crosby. (This is no longer possible under Academy guidelines.) Due to wartime metal shortages, Fitzgerald received a plaster Oscar (instead of a gold-plated britannium one) for his performance. Embarrassingly, a few weeks after he won, he broke the head off his plaster Oscar while practicing his golf swing. A funny photo exists of a befuddled Fitzgerald holding the evidence

Fr. O'Malley's favorite baseball team is the St. Louis Browns. The year "Going My Way" was released, 1944, was the only season the Browns reached the World Series while in St. Louis.

Jean Heather, who plays Carol, the young aspiring singer, was being groomed for stardom by Paramount, and was also featured as Barbara Stanwyck's step-daughter in another 1944 Paramount hit, Billy Wilder's La fiamma del peccato (1944). She only completed ten films before her movie career was cut short by a serious auto accident in which she was thrown from her vehicle and suffered serious head injuries.

Bing Crosby sang "Swinging on a Star" by Jimmy Van Heusen, which went on to win an Academy Award for Best Song. Crosby sang four different Oscar-winning songs in his films. The others were: "Sweet Leilani" (1937) in the film "Waikiki Wedding"; "White Christmas" (1942) from the film "Holiday Inn; and "In the Cool. Cool, Cool of the Evening" (1951) from "Here Comes the Bride",

Filmed in St. Monica Catholic Church near the beach in Santa Monica, California. Leo McCarey based the Barry Fitzgerald character in part on the church's real (irascible) pastor, Msgnr. Nicholas Conneally.