First Academy Award Ceremony was Held - 1929

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.

 

 

Michael Thomas Barry is the author of numerous books that includes Fade to Black Graveside Memories of Hollywood Greats, 1927-1950. The was awarded a silver medal at the 2011 Readers Favorite International Book Awards in Miami and was also the 2013 winner of the Beverly Hills Book Awards. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for more details about his books. To order Fade to Black click on the Amazon link below.

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1st Academy Awards Ceremony is Held - 1929

On this day in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its first awards, at a dinner party for around 250 people held in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California. The brainchild of Louis B. Mayer, head of the powerful MGM film studio, the Academy was organized in May 1927 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of the film industry. Its first president and the host of the May 1929 ceremony was the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Unlike today, the winners of the first Oscars--as the coveted gold-plated statuettes later became known--were announced before the awards ceremony itself. 

At the time of the first Oscar ceremony, sound had just been introduced into film. The Warner Bros. movie The Jazz Singer--one of the first "talkies"--was not allowed to compete for Best Picture because the Academy decided it was unfair to let movies with sound compete with silent films. The first official Best Picture winner (and the only silent film to win Best Picture) was Wings, directed by William Wellman. The most expensive movie of its time, with a budget of $2 million, the movie told the story of two World War I pilots who fall for the same woman. Another film, F.W. Murnau's epic Sunrise, was considered a dual winner for the best film of the year. German actor Emil Jannings won the Best Actor honor for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, while 22-year-old Janet Gaynor was the only female winner. After receiving three out of the five Best Actress nods, she won for all three roles, in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise. 

A special honorary award was presented to Charlie Chaplin. Originally a nominee for Best Actor, Best Writer and Best Comedy Director for The Circus, Chaplin was removed from these categories so he could receive the special award, a change that some attributed to his unpopularity in Hollywood. It was the last Oscar the Hollywood maverick would receive until another honorary award in 1971. The Academy officially began using the nickname Oscar for its awards in 1939; a popular but unconfirmed story about the source of the name holds that Academy executive director Margaret Herrick remarked that the statuette looked like her Uncle Oscar. Since 1942, the results of the secret ballot voting have been announced during the live-broadcast Academy Awards ceremony using the sealed-envelope system. The suspense--not to mention the red-carpet arrival of nominees and other stars wearing their most beautiful or outrageous evening wear--continues to draw international attention to the film industry's biggest night of the year.