To the general public, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences simply means the Oscars. But to the founders sixty-five years ago and to the five thousand active members, the Academy has always meant much more. To place the birth of the Oscars in proper perspective, it is necessary first to examine the Academy itself and its many other important activities in addition to the annual awards.

When the idea for an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was developed in the late 1920s, the movie industry was in the midst of its greatest period of change. Potentially revolutionary experiments in sound had begun which would seriously threaten and finally doom the silent picture. Repercussions from scandals that had rocked Hollywood earlier in the decade were still being felt, and the industry, particularly sensitive to outside attacks and cries for censorship, searched for a manageable way to protect itself.

Less known to the public but of great concern within the industry was the growing mood of unionism. There had been a strike by studio craftsmen in 1918, and by the mid-twenties the labor struggle had intensified. Los Angeles was a stronghold of the open shop and, as such, presented a challenge to organized labor. On November 29, 1926, nine major studios and five unions signed the Studio Basic Agreement, and the motion picture industry became unionized after a ten-year struggle. The pact, however, covered only stagehands, carpenters, musicians, electricians, and painters; the major talent groups were still without bargaining power, and the producers could only anticipate that the actors, writers, and directors would also soon press for standardized contracts.

In such a climate the seeds of the Academy were sown. During the first week of January 1927, five weeks after the Studio Basic Agreement was signed, the idea for a new organization was suggested over dinner at the home of MOM chief Louis B. Mayer. Present as Mayer's guests were actor Conrad Nagel and director Fred Niblo. Several sources also claim Fred Beetson of the Association of Motion Picture Producers was present, and Beetson himself later wrote in an Academy Bulletin of his good fortune "to be one of the original four to discuss the value to the industry of forming an organization for the benefit of all in the industry." The prospect of such an institution prompted the men to plan a dinner the following week to which they would invite representatives from all creative branches of the motion picture industry.

On January 11, 1927, thirty-six people gathered at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an association which would be mutually beneficial. These persons became the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (see Appendix I). By March 19, 1927, articles of incorporation had been presented and the first officers elected. Douglas Fairbanks was chosen as president, with Fred Niblo as vice-president, M. C. Levee as treasurer, and Frank Woods as secretary. The Academy was granted a charter as a non-profit corporation by the State of California on May 4, 1927, and a week later on May 11, an organizational banquet was held at the Biltmore Hotel. Three hundred persons attended, and, according to the Academy's 1929 Annual Report, 231 people joined the new Academy that night.

Because it was not limited to a single studio or to a specific talent group, the newly created organization had great potential as a forum for exchanging ideas and settling differences. "Each of the talent classes had grievances with no medium for their adjustment," wrote Frank Woods. "But more than this and of greater importance as some of us viewed it, the screen and all its people were under a great and alarming cloud of public censure and contempt.... Some constructive action seemed imperative to halt the attacks and establish the industry in the public mind as a respectable, legitimate institution, and its people as reputable individuals."

Shortly after the organizational banquet, the Academy published on June 20, 1927, a statement of aims which read in part:

Despite the positive and nobly stated purposes of the Academy, critics would later charge that the organization was nothing more than a company union conceived by the wily Mayer as a means by which the producers could control the talent groups and forestall unionization. Murray Ross wrote in Stars and Strikes, his 1941 study of Hollywood's labor struggle: "The founding of the Academy was a master stroke of producer ingenuity; its successful operation resulted from actor acquiescence in its policies." Others vehemently denied the charges and pointed out that the structure of the Academy offered equal representation to all. The producers constituted only one of the five branches of the Academy—actors, directors, technicians, and writers had equal status—and the Board of Directors which ran the organization was made up of three representatives from each branch.

A labor dispute became the first order of business for the new Academy. In the summer of 1927 the studios, claiming pressure from their New York bankers, tried to impose a 10 percent salary cut as a response to charges of financial mismanagement and extravagance. When the talent groups protested loudly and threatened to strike, the studios quickly suggested that the producers' branch of the Academy hold conferences with the other branches to air grievances and suggest ways of cutting costs. The sessions were held, and the result was a decision to withdraw the proposed salary cut. But when this announcement was made at an Academy dinner on July 28, 1927, the producers let the other branches accept the blame for soaring motion picture costs. The talent branches felt double-crossed, and though the Academy claimed credit for averting the salary cut, this episode marked the beginning for many of a distrust of the Academy's impartiality in labor-management disputes. The realization that sound pictures would become more than a passing fad prompted many legitimate stage actors to come to Hollywood and switch to film work. Many of these stage players belonged to the Actors' Equity Association which had won a closed shop on Broadway in 1919, and a controversy soon developed over who should represent film actors. In December 1927 the Academy announced the successful negotiation of a contract for free-lance actors, which was the first standard actor-producer agreement in the history of Hollywood. For the next two years Equity battled the Academy for the right to represent actors, but AMPAS gained the advantage after a 1929 strike by Equity failed to generate sufficient support.

The novelty of talking pictures had sustained movie box-office receipts after the crash of 1929, but in 1931 the depression caught up with the film industry. By 1933
Paramount was bankrupt, RKO and Universal were in receivership, and Fox had been forced to reorganize. The crisis came in March 1933 when President Roosevelt
declared a nationwide bank holiday. Hollywood reeled. Some studios immediately suspended salaries; others talked of closing, and production schedules were suddenly uncertain. The Academy quickly formed an Emergency Committee which suggested temporary 50 percent pay cuts as an alternative to a complete shutdown. The committee worked out a scale making the cuts more equitable for low income workers, and no salary cuts were to last longer than the eight-week period from March 6th to April 30th. Many studios restored salaries immediately, others were to resume full pay on a timetable worked out by the Academy committee.

The Academy was given the right to inspect the studios' financial records, and Price Waterhouse and Company was hired to conduct the audits. (Three years later the firm would be retained by the Academy on a permanent basis to tabulate the Academy Award voting.) The stumbling block arose when Warner Brothers refused to restore salaries on the date set by the Academy. Darryl Zanuck, then with Wamers, had promised his employees that the studio would abide by the Academy decision, and when it refused, Zanuck resigned his ,000-a-week job in protest.

The Warners controversy also precipitated the resignation of Conrad Nagel as Academy president when his actions met with the disapproval of the Board. The Los Angeles Times quoted Nagel as saying he worked through Will Hays to persuade Harry Warner to accept the Academy decision, but another paper claimed Nagel supported Warner's stand and in doing so drew a vote of no confidence from the Academy directors. The Academy issued a statement simply saying "the intensive struggle within the industry within the last few weeks has resulted in many questions of Academy policy with some of which Mr. Nagel felt he could not agree."

The Academy survived this crisis but with a further erosion of its reputation because the salary waiver plan had not been popular with the talent groups. Despite the Academy's attempt to deal equitably with a difficult situation, "it marked," one labor historian noted, "the beginning of the end of the usefulness of the AMPAS in the labor relations field."

J. T. Reed replaced Nagel as president and immediately speeded up work on a new constitution that would reorganize the Academy. After less than a month in office Reed sent "An Open Letter to Every Member of the Academy" in which he outlined the changes in structure and policy. "Every effort has been made," he wrote, "to guarantee that both the election system and the Academy as a whole will be free from politics, and from any taint of self-preservation in office."

Further trouble erupted that summer. Already pressured by internal strife and the growing militancy of Hollywood unionization, the Academy nearly capsized in the troubled waters of the National Recovery Administration. On June 16, 1933, Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act which suspended anti-trust laws and allowed industries to regulate themselves through "codes of fair competition." The NRA Motion Picture Code became the longest of more than six hundred industry codes drawn up. Though J. T. Reed was a member of the code committee, the Academy lacked enough internal unity to be much of a factor in the code hearings. The studios saw the code as a first step toward government control of the industry, and the talent groups saw it as a tool for further producer dominance.

Convinced that the Academy was not acting in their best interests, several actors quit to form the Screen Actors Guild in July 1933, and the new group gained further impetus that fall when the provisions of the code became known. As Murray Ross noted: "The final draft of the NRA code published in September contained the agency-licensing, salary-control, and antiraiding provisions which aroused instant and widespread indignation. The knowledge that Reed, the president of the Academy, was a member of the committee which drafted the obnoxious provisions intensified the actors' resentment."

Thus began an exodus of actors. In October, fourteen prominent stars, including James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Frank Morgan, Paul Muni, and George Raft, resigned from the Academy. By November the fledgling Screen Actors Guild had over a thousand members. A rejuvenated Screen Writers Guild, whose aims were similar, joined with the actors and jointly published The Screen Guild's Magazine, which constantly editorialized against the Academy and called it a company union.

At issue was the power struggle for the right to represent the talent groups in negotiations with the producers. "Hidden behind the mask of an arbiter of taste," the Screen Actors Guild charged, "and obscured under the cloak of research, what the Academy is really trying to do is destroy the possibility of an honest actor organization—of, by, and for actors.... The Guild is not going to be destroyed. But the Academy cannot exist and claim jurisdiction over actors without throwing a constant harpoon into Guild efforts for betterment of actor conditions."

On May 27, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration was unconstitutional. The removal of the controversial Code of Fair Competition left labor relations in Hollywood even more chaotic than before. And so the battle raged. The low point in Academy-Guild relations came at the Eighth Awards banquet held March 5, 1936. A few days before the dinner the Screen Guilds sent their members the following telegram:

The boycott was successful, and only a handful of actors and writers attended the Oscar ceremony. Dudley Nichols, a militant member of the Screen Writers Guild who had resigned from the Academy three years earlier, won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and became the first person to refuse an Academy Award. "1 realize," Nichols wrote, "the awards were voted by a generous membership who had no thought of personal partiality or political interest. But a writer who accepts an Academy award tacitly supports the Academy, and I believe it to be the duty of every screen writer to stand with his own, and to strengthen the Guild."

In 1937 the Academy rewrote its by-laws and withdrew completely from labor-movement negotiations. W. S. Van Dyke, who chaired the Academy's Reorganization Committee, pointed out that the change allowed the Academy "to return to its first principles and be non-economic and non-political in theory and in fact."

Though finally divisive, the Academy's ten-year involvement with labor problems was by no means a complete failure. In the early days the Conciliation Committee had successfully settled a number of disputes between individuals of different branches, and the Academy's efforts in negotiating provided a foundation on which the Guilds could later build. In their detailed study of the labor movement in Los Angeles, Louis and Richard Perry concluded:

Only once after 1937 did the Academy reenter the stormy world of politics, and that occurred during the blacklist period of the 1950s. On February 6, 1957, the Academy enacted the following rule: "Any person who, before any duly constituted Federal legislative committee or body, shall have admitted that he is a member of the Communist Party (and has not since publicly renounced the party) or who shall have refused to answer whether or not he is, or was, a member of the Communist Party or shall have refused to respond to a subpoena to appear before such a committee or body, shall be ineligible for any Academy Award so long as he persists in such a refusal."

One person affected by the rule was screenwriter Michael Wilson, who had won an Oscar for A Place in the Sun (1951) before being blacklisted. He appeared certain to be nominated for Friendly Persuasion (which was released in 1956 without screenplay credit), but when the nominations were announced February 18th the film was listed without Wilson's name. That same year blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo won an Oscar for writing The Brave One but was unable to claim it since he had written the film under the pseudonym Robert Rich.

Late in 1958 several Academy members, including George Seaton and Valentine Davies, began a campaign to repeal the rule. Among that year's possible nominations for Best Story and Screenplay was The Defiant Ones, written by Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith. Smith was "clean" but Douglas (a pseudonym for blacklisted screenwriter Ned Young) had once taken the Fifth Amendment. The Academy, faced with the embarrassing prospect of having to declare half of a writing team ineligible, revoked the rule on January 12, 1959, six weeks before the 1958 nominations were announced. Denying any specific connection to The Defiant Ones (for which Douglas and Smith did win Oscars), the Board of Governors issued a statement calling the rule "unworkable and impractical to administer and enforce." In the future the Academy would simply "honor achievements as presented."

Dalton Trumbo hailed the Academy decision as the equivalent of an official end to the blacklist. In a letter to Michael Wilson he wrote, "How can an industry officially rescind a blacklist which legally it cannot admit the existence of? There wax, however, the Academy rule. Revocation of the Academy rule was the nearest thing to an official rescission of the blacklist that could or will occur."

In 1975 Trumbo finally received his 1956 Oscar after Frank and Maurice King, producers of The Brave One, sent the Academy an affidavit verifying that the mysterious Robert Rich was in fact Trumbo. In 1985 two more blacklisted writers received overdue recognition. Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters for The Bridge on the River Kwai, had been denied onscreen credit, which instead went to Pierre Boulle, author of the novel on which the screenplay was based. Boulle received the 1957 Oscar for a screenplay he had not written. In 1985 the Academy set the record straight and awarded posthumous Oscars to the families of Foreman and Wilson.

The Research Council became quite prominent during World War II. The Academy had maintained a training course for Signal Corps officers since 1930, and during World War II the Council sponsored a series of schools for motion-picture cameramen and still photographers in the Signal Corps and the Marines. Even before war was declared, the Signal Corps turned to Hollywood for help in preparing training films. Under the leadership of Dairy 1 Zanuck, the Research Council in October 1940 volunteered to negotiate the contracts for government films. The studios and guilds pledged their support, and by November 1940 the Council had become the body that would distribute the projects to the studios. The agreement was to assign the projects alphabetically, but frequent exceptions were made, and smaller producers not a party to the Research Council's plan complained they were being frozen out. As Harry Truman's Senate committee on the war effort discovered in 1943, the assignments had not always been parceled out evenly—of the $1.4 million spent by the government in this period more than 70 percent went to four major studios: Paramount, Twentieth-Century-Fox, MGM, and RKO. The Research Council delivered 330 reels to the War Department before the contract was canceled in December 1942.

The Research Council was also responsible for determining officers' commissions for motion picture people who joined the Armed Forces. The Military Personnel Selection Committee considered over fifteen hundred applicants, recommending 105 for commissions and 610 for enlistment.

The invaluable work performed during the war was the last major activity of the Academy's Research Council. To facilitate its acceptance of funding from commercial companies, the Council was transferred to the Association of Motion Picture Producers in January 1948 and renamed the Motion Picture Research Council.

When the Academy was founded in 1927 no one could imagine that the annual awards would eventually overshadow all of the organization's other activities. That these other projects are less publicized than the Oscar does not diminish their importance. The record in the field of education, for instance, is nearly as old as the Academy itself.

The early investigations in lighting resulted in the Academy's first book, Report on Incandescent Illumination, published in 1928, and the sound school resulted in two volumes: Recording Sound for Motion Pictures in 1931 and the updated, more authoritative Motion Picture Sound Engineering in 1938.

The College Affairs Committee had cooperated with the University of Southern California in 1928 to present a film course, and these lectures were published the following year as Introduction to the Photoplay. Several universities began their cinema departments with help from the Academy, and the practice of assisting college students and faculty members is continued today by the National Film Information Service, a mail service to researchers, and the Visiting Artists Program.

The Academy has made four attempts to publish a magazine. The first effort, Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which lasted for only a single issue, was published in November 1927 and circulated only to Academy members. It featured articles, Academy news, a lithograph by Cedric Gibbons, and an artistic photograph by Karl Struss. The following year the Board signed a contract to purchase an existing periodical called Hollywood, but when it became apparent that the magazine could not be turned into a national publication the contract was canceled by mutual consent. A third try in 1939 was titled Montage. Intended as a monthly, only one issue was printed. According to Academy executive secretary Donald Gledhill, it was to have contained film information "upon a level comparable to the academic and professional journals in other fields." The most recent attempt at an Academy magazine came in 1972. Academy Leader offered a mix of film news and reviews and featured excellent reproductions of stills. Intended as a quarterly, it ceased publication after three issues. Several other Academy publications have been more lasting. The Screen Achievements Records Bulletin began in 1933 as a list of film productions and credits for writers and directors. Known since 1978 as the Annual Index of Motion Picture Credits, this document now provides an authoritative list of credits in ten craft areas. Equally important to the industry is the Academy Players Directory, published three times a year, which serves as a casting director's bible. Pictures of the player and the name of the player's agent are included, and everyone gets the same amount of space, regardless of rank or reputation. The publication, begun in 1937 as an alternative to the many private casting directories that exploited actors, now includes approximately twenty thousand entries.

In 1970 the Academy and the Writers Guild of America jointly published Who Wrote the Movie and What Else Did He Write?, a comprehensive directory of screen-writing credits from 1936 through 1969.

The Academy Foundation was created in the early 1940s to oversee educational and cultural activities of the motion picture industry. First discussed in September 1942 by Charles Coburn, George Stevens, Farciot Edouart, Walter Wanger, and Darryl Zanuck, the Foundation filed articles of incorporation on January 31, 1944. It is incorporated separately from the Academy in order to qualify for certain tax exemption privileges and to receive state, federal, and private funding.

One of the first and most valuable projects of the Foundation was the restoration of the Library of Congress Paper Prints Collection. Motion pictures made between 1894 and 1912 were copyrighted as a series of still photographs by reproducing a paper print of the celluloid original. Approximately 2.5 million feet of these prints were stored and forgotten in Washington until discovered in the early 1940s by Howard Walls, then working for the Copyright Office. Walls subsequently was appointed Curator of the Motion Picture Collection of the Library of Congress, and he set about to find a means of transferring the paper prints back to film. With the help of Carl Gregory he started the restoration process but was forced to stop in 1947 when Congress voted to discontinue the Motion Picture Division. The Academy Foundation was persuaded to undertake the project, and Walls was hired as curator of the film archives. After Walls left the Academy in the early 1950s, Kemp Niver took over the restoration work and successfully devised an economical way of transferring the priceless paper prints to 16mm film. When the Academy's funds for the project ran out after two and a half years, Senator Thomas Kuchel (R-Calif.) successfully pushed through a government appropriation to complete the work. Niver received an Honorary Oscar in 1954 for his Renovare process which made possible the completion of the ten-year project.

The Academy encourages film study in a number of ways. Scholarships and grants are given both in the United States and abroad to encourage the development of film schools, and the Visiting Artists Program sends industry professionals to college campuses as speakers. The Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting provide financial remuneration for aspiring screenwriters. For almost twenty years the Academy has honored young filmmakers with the Student Film Awards. The Academy Foundation sponsors seminars on aspects of filmmaking as well as four specific annual lectures: the Marvin Borowsky Lecture on Screenwriting (begun in 1973), the George Pal Lecture on Fantasy in Film (begun in 1980), the Jack Oakie Lecture on Comedy in Film (begun in 1981), and the George Stevens Lecture on Directing (begun in 1982).

The Academy headquarters in Beverly Hills houses the 1,111-seat Samuel Goldwyn Theater, a custom-designed facility capable of handling every known projection and sound system. It sets the standard for the industry and is regarded as one of the technically finest movie theaters in the world.

The Margaret Herrick Library is named for the woman who served as executive director of the Academy from 1943 until 1970 when she retired. The research facility, begun in 1931, is open to the public and holds one of the world's most complete collections of film-related material.

On January 28, 1991, the Academy opened its Center for Motion Picture Study in the renovated Beverly Hills Waterworks building on La Cienega Boulevard. The Center houses the Margaret Herrick Library and the Academy Film Archive.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was organized in 1927, among the several general committees formed was one named Awards of Merit. The original seven members of this group were Sid Grauman, Bess Meredyth, J. Stuart Blackton, Richard Barthelmess, D. W. Griffith, and Henry King, with Cedric Gibbons as chairman. (Charles Rosher and George Fawcett subsequently replaced Griffith, Gibbons, and Barthelmess.) An awards presentation was considered by this committee, and a 1928 Academy Bulletin reported that "a partial plan was worked out, but, in the press of other business, no definite action was taken by the Board."

By May 1928 interest in the awards had been revived, and that summer the procedure for nominations was worked out. In July the Academy Board authorized awards in twelve categories and, anticipating that the contest would become a yearly event, decided to limit the nominations to achievements in pictures released in a specific twelve-month period. August 1, 1927, to July 31, 1928, was declared the period of eligibility, and the studios happily furnished the Academy with a list of pictures released within those dates. To refresh the memories of its members, the Academy sent this reminder list of eligible films to everyone, a practice that has been maintained to the present.

Five Boards of Judges—one for each Academy branch—were appointed to consider the nominations made by the general membership, and by the August 15, 1928, deadline nearly one thousand nominations had been received. The rules stated "no national or Academy membership distinctions are to be considered."

A list of the ten achievements in each category receiving the highest number of votes was turned over to the Boards of Judges which narrowed the ten choices down to three recommendations for each award. A Central Board of Judges consisting of one member from each branch examined these three finalists in each class and decided who was to receive the first place and honorable mentions. The five men who decided these first awards were: Alec Francis, representing the Actors Branch; Frank Lloyd, Directors; Sid Grauman, Producers; Tom Geraghty, Writers; and A. George Volck, Technicians. The results were announced immediately, though the presentations were not made until three months later at the Academy's second anniversary banquet.

The period of eligibility remained August 1st to July 31st for the next four years but was changed to the calendar year for the Sixth Awards. The adjustment required the addition of five months to the eligibility period, so the 1932/33 Awards covered August 1, 1932, to December 31, 1933. Since 1934 the eligibility period has remained January 1st to December 31st. (Short Films, Documentaries, and the Foreign Language Film Award have different eligibility periods and are exceptions to the general rule.)

The selection of winners by Branch and Central Boards of Judges was used again for the Second Awards, though the number of categories was pared to seven and the practice of awarding honorable mentions was dropped. Sound pictures were eligible for the first time, having been excluded from consideration the first year because their development was too recent to insure competitive results.

The selection process was broadened the following year, and for the Third through the Eighth Awards nominations and final voting were by the full Academy membership. In 1936 (9th year) nominations were made by a special Awards Nominating Committee appointed by the Academy president, but the final vote was retained by the full membership.

The problems in labor relations that plagued the Academy in the mid-thirties had resulted in the resignation of nearly half of the members, so, in an attempt to get a more representative vote and also to appear more democratic, nominating and final voting privileges were extended to the motion picture guilds and unions as well as to Academy members. This expansion of eligible voters remained in effect from 1937 (10th year) through 1945 (18th year). Class B of the Screen Actors' Guild—the extras—was dropped in 1944, and in 1946 (19th year) the final vote was again limited to Academy members. Guilds and unions continued to vote for nominees until 1957 (30th year) when the current rule of nominating and final voting by Academy members only was put back into effect.

Each branch of the Academy makes its own rules. Most achievements are not "entered" in competition; they are simply eligible if they have met the following general rule:

Four categories allow exceptions to this general rule: Documentaries and Short Films are entered by their producers, and Music Awards require the creator of the achievement to file an Official Submission Form. Foreign Language Films are submitted by each country's equivalent to AMPAS (limit: one film per country). (The three current exceptions to the location rule are Documentaries, Short Films, and the entries for the Foreign Language Film Award.)

Rules are sometimes created or clarified as a result of a controversy or confusion. Many Academy members, for instance, felt Bette Davis's 1934 performance in Of Human Bondage was the best of the year, and a furor erupted when her name was not listed among the nominees for Best Actress. The Academy was forced to accept write-in candidates, but the confusion eventually brought about a rule prohibiting write-ins.

With the creation of the Supporting Actor and Actress categories in 1936, it was only a matter of time before clarifying rules would be needed. Paulette Goddard's 1943 nomination for Supporting Actress in So Proudly We Hail left many members asking if she really belonged under Best Actress since she had received co-star billing for the role. The following year Barry Fitzgerald, who co-starred with Bing Crosby in Going My Way, found himself nominated in two categories for the same role. (He lost the Best Actor award to Crosby but won the Supporting Actor Oscar.) The Academy finally asked the studios to designate which category the performance belonged in, and thereafter the yearly reminder lists to members carried a designation distinguishing the leads from the supporting roles. In 1964 the Academy Board of Governors voted to omit this differentiation, and the rule now in effect says the "determination as to whether a role is a lead or a support shall be made individually by members of the [Actors'] branch at the time of balloting."

An actor or actress can no longer be nominated in both categories for the same performance, but the rules have never prevented a nomination in lead and supporting categories for two different roles. This happened to Fay Bainter in 1938, Teresa Wright in 1942, Jessica Lange in 1982, Sigourney Weaver in 1988, and Al Pacino in 1992. (Bainter, Wright, and Lange lost the Best Actress award but won for Supporting Actress; Pacino won Best Actor but lost in the Supporting Actor category; Weaver lost in both categories.) Nor can actors and actresses compete against themselves. Should two different performances by the same person receive enough votes for a nomination, only one will be accepted.

For several years it was possible for a film to be eligible for both Documentary Short Subject and Short Subject-Live Action, but when Sentinels of Silence won the 1971 Oscars in both categories the rule was changed to allow a film to compete in either but not both classifications. The choice was then left to the producer. Present rules, however, prohibit documentary films from being entered in the Short Films competition.

One cannot, it appears, refuse Academy recognition. Actor George C. Scott declined his 1970 Best Actor nomination for Patton, just as he had done in 1961 for a Supporting Actor nomination in The Hustler. Daniel Taradash, president of the Academy, tersely explained that it was Scott's performance, not Scott, that was involved and that the nomination would stand. It did, and Scott won. Two years later Marion Brando refused his Best Actor award won for The Godfather on the grounds that Hollywood had not treated the American Indian fairly in its pictures. Neither Scott's nor Brando's action was without precedent, since Dudley Nichols had previously refused a 1935 Oscar for writing The Informer. Despite such refusals, all men are still listed as winners.

Oscars have occasionally been awarded to persons who have died before their achievements could be recognized. The most recent posthumous award went to the late Howard Ashman, lyricist for "Beauty and the Beast," winner of the 1991 Best Song award. Peter Finch died before being named Best Actor for his 1976 role in Network. The practice of posthumous awards goes all the way back to the first awards ceremony when an honorable mention for Title Writing was presented to Gerald Duffy who had died some months before. Due to unusual circumstances, composer Raymond Rasch didn't win his Oscar until eight years after he died. Rasch, Larry Russell (who had also died before winning the award), and Charlie Chaplin had collaborated on the musical score of Chaplin's 1952 film Limelight. The film was never released in the Los Angeles area until 1972 when it qualified for and won the award for Best Original Dramatic Score.

Price Waterhouse and Company, the firm of certified public accountants which had first worked with the Academy during the 1933 bank moratorium salary crisis, began counting Oscar ballots in 1936, the year a preferential system of voting was begun:

For the first twelve years of the Academy Awards, the final results of the balloting were released to the press prior to the ceremony to accommodate newspaper deadlines, but when one paper broke the pledge not to print the winners' names until after the ceremony the practice of advance notice ended. With the 1940 Awards came sealed envelopes and secrecy. From 1940 to 1955 the names of all winners were withheld until the actual awards presentation. Since the 29th Awards in 1956, the annual awards voted by the entire Academy membership have remained secret until the presentation. The "other" awards voted by the Board of Governors are announced in advance. These include Honorary, Special Achievement, and Scientific or Technical Awards as well as the Thalberg, Hersholt, and Sawyer awards.

The Academy Award statuette was designed in 1928 by MGM Art Director Cedric Gibbons. Once his sketches (which, contrary to the popular myth, were not first drawn on the tablecloth during an Academy banquet) were approved by the Academy Board, Los Angeles sculptor George Stanley created the trophy. The figure represents a knight holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film whose spokes represent the five original branches of the Academy—Actors, Directors, Producers, Technicians, and Writers. The nickname Oscar dates from the early 1930s, and several people, including Margaret Herrick (then the Academy's librarian, later Executive Director), actress Bette Davis, and Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, have claimed credit for the nickname. Verification of who really named Oscar is not possible, but the nickname won immediate approval. The Oscar is thirteen and a half inches tall and weighs eight and a half pounds. It is made of britannium and is gold plated. The statuettes have been numbered since 1949 (starting with #501).

Academy Awards may take several forms. Recipients of all annual awards, Special Achievement awards, Scientific or Technical Awards of Merit, Hersholt, and Sawyer awards receive Oscar statuettes. Recipients of the Scientific and Engineering Award receive Academy plaques, and the Technical Achievement Award winners receive certificates. The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award is a bronze head of Thalberg. Honorary Awards may be a statuette, scroll, life membership, or any design ordered by the Board of Governors. Walt Disney, for example, received one large statuette and seven miniatures for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Edgar Bergen got a wooden statuette when honored for the creation of Charlie McCarthy. On the eleven occasions when an Honorary Juvenile Award was given, the winner received a miniature statuette. All nominees receive Certificates of Nomination,

World War II produced one temporary change in the Oscar: plaster statuettes were awarded in 1942, 1943, and 1944 when all metals were needed for the war effort. These ersatz Oscars were replaced by the genuine metal ones after the war. Another tradition, however, ended permanently during World War II. The Academy banquet, a yearly event since the first organizational dinner in 1927, was discontinued in 1944. A banquet seemed inappropriate during wartime, especially in a country that was rationing its food, and, more practically, the crowds had grown too large to be comfortably accommodated at a dinner.

After alternating between the Ambassador and Biltmore Hotels for several years, the awards ceremony switched to a theater setting in 1944 when the banquet was discontinued. After three years at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, two at the Shrine Auditorium, and one at the Academy's own Academy Awards Theatre, the Oscar ceremony settled in for eleven straight years at RKO's Pantages Theatre. In 1961 (33rd year) the ceremony moved to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium where it remained until 1969 when it switched to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles County Music Center. Here the ceremony has remained except for three years (the 60th Awards in 1988, the 61st Awards in 1989, and the 63rd Awards in 1991) when the presentations returned after a forty-year absence to the Shrine Civic Auditorium.

The publicity achieved through radio and television has helped immeasurably to popularize the Oscar and the people who win them. The first awards drew little coverage, but the second awards caused enough interest to prompt Los Angeles radio station KNX to broadcast an hour of the ceremonies. The entire ceremony was broadcast for the first time in 1945 over the ABC network and the Armed Forces Radio Service. Such exposure may be one reason why the Academy has frequently asked a comedian to host the presentations. Will Rogers and humorist Irvin S. Cobb were among the hosts during the first decade of awards. Bob Hope served as master of ceremonies a dozen and a half times between 1940 and 1978, and Johnny Carson assumed those duties five times between 1979 and 1984. Billy Crystal has hosted the last four Oscar presentations.

The Academy had always depended upon the Hollywood studios to underwrite the cost of the awards presentations, but in 1949 the studios announced the end of their financial support. Some said the pullout was due to the British film Hamlet being named Best Picture in 1948, but Newsweek reported that the decision had been reached months before the 1948 winners were announced. By the early 1950s the Academy faced a financial crisis but ironically was rescued by television, a medium then regarded with great suspicion by Hollywood. RCA Victor agreed to sponsor the 1952 Awards which NBC would televise for the first time. Life magazine noted wryly that television "bought the rights to the ceremony for ,000, used it for a one-and-a-half-hour show which presumably kept millions of TV-viewers from going to the movies that night." Despite criticisms that the awards had been tainted by commercialism, the marriage of Oscar and television was successful, and Variety headlined "1st MAJOR PIX-TV WEDDING BIG CLICK." The national TV hookup allowed the Academy to experiment with simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York; viewers would be switched back and forth according to which city the winner was in. For five years, 1953 through 1957, this practice of holding presentations on both coasts was continued. The Oscar ceremonies were telecast in color for the first time in 1966 (by ABC); radio broadcasts were dropped in favor of television coverage only in 1969.

In its first sixty-five years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has grown from thirty-six founders (see Appendix I) to an organization of over fifty-four hundred members. Of this total, five thousand are active and life members, and the remaining are non-voting associate members. Dues for all are . For many years the fee remained a year. Dues were raised to in 1985 and to the present rate in 1993.