When the 88th Academy Awards go down this Sunday, everyone will be scrambling to the internet to try to figure out, if Eddie Redmayne wins another Academy Award for best actor, why someone has won more awards than there have been to see his films. Or maybe, if Sylvester Stallone gets his due, how actor and Stallone can go together in the same sentence. Without further ado, let's play with Oscar for a little while.
What was has become a glamourous to-do had its humble beginnings in the 1920s. It was a time when women began to demand the right to vote. Though, in the movies, they were seen and not heard. Researchers would come tro find out that it was not a vast male conspiracy but that synchronized sound had yet to be invented. Movie attendance was on the rise as people began to realize they weren't going to be ran over by the train coming at them, the camera man filming on the train tracks, an entirely different subject matter.
Film had become a huge business, thanks to men like Louis B. Mayer, who made Mr. Krabs on SpongeBob SquarePants look absolutely philanthropic. He would serve as the brains behind the forming of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His motivation? To stave off growing influence of unions. According to the website AmericanInClass.org, from 1922 to 1930, " U.S. movie attendance soared from about forty percent to over ninety percent of the population. Everyone was unhappy because the money was going into people like MGM head Louis B. Mayer's pocket and no one else's. David Thomson wrote this in his book The Big Screen, ''Mayer saw the Academy a bland uber-union, a place forum where grievances could be settled." (p.48)
They took it one further and decided to start giving out awards because, yes, you guessed it, it was great publicity for their films
Who were the first winners? Not a guess? Wings won for Best Picture. Emil Jannings took best actor and Janet Gaynor took best actress. Some of the notable records-
- Most Nominations for a Film - 14 All About Eve, Titanic
- Most Wins by a Director - 4 John Ford
- By an Actor - 4 Katherine Hepburn
- Most Awards by a Foreign Language Film - 5 Fanny & Alexander, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
- Most Consecutive Best Actress - 2 Katherine Hepburn Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 1967, The Lion in the Winter 1968. Luise Rainier The Great Ziegfeld 1936, The God Earth
- Most Conecutive Best Actor - 2 Spencer Tracy Captain's Courageous 1937, Boys Town 1938. Tom Hanks Philadelphia 1993, Forest Gump 1994
- Most Consecutive Best Director - John Ford The Grapes of Wrath 1940, How Green Was My Valley 1941
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