What happened on this date in Hollywood history – May 16,
1929, the first Academy Awards ceremony is held. The awards banquet took place
in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Some 270 people attended,
and tickets cost $5 each. After a long dinner, complete with numerous speeches,
Douglas Fairbanks, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, which had been formed in 1927, handed out 15 awards in a five-minute
ceremony. The awards presentation was somewhat anticlimactic compared to
today’s Academy Award ceremonies, as the winners had already been announced in
February.
In 1929, movies were just making the transition from
silent films to talkies, but all the nominated films were without sound. For
the only time in Academy history, Best Picture honors were split into two
categories: Best Picture - Unique and Artistic Production, and Best Picture -
Production. The winner in the first category was F.W. Murnau’s romantic drama Sunrise:
A Song of Two Humans, starring George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor. William
Wellman’s film Wings, set in the World War I-era and starring Clara Bow,
Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen, won in the second category. Other winners
of the night included the German actor Emil Jannings as Best Actor for two
films, The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh; and Gaynor as
Best Actress. She had received three of the five nominations in the category,
and was honored for all three roles, in Sunrise, Seventh Heaven
and Street Angel. The Academy also presented an honorary award to
Charles Chaplin; it would be the only honor the great actor and filmmaker would
receive from the organization until 1972, when he accept another honorary
award. Starting with the following year’s awards, the Academy began releasing
the names of the winners to the press on the night of the awards ceremony to
preserve some suspense. That practice ended in 1940, after the Los Angeles
Times published the results in its evening edition, which meant they were
revealed before the ceremony. The Academy then instituted a system of sealed
envelopes, which remains in use today.
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