The first Oscar Ceremony lasted 15 minutes. What happened?
Comment s'est passée la première cérémonie des Oscars qui n'a duré que quinze minutes ?
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Intermèdes comiques, discours entrecoupés de sanglots, statuettes dorées, smokings et robes de soirées : la cérémonie des Oscars est le symbole de tout le glamour d'Hollywood. Cette année, pandémie oblige, l’événement sera plus modeste, signant un véritable retour aux sources. En effet, les Oscars étaient auparavant une affaire bien plus intime. Histoire de cet événement culte avec The New York Times.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the two-month postponement of the 2021 Oscars because of the pandemic, it didn’t address the question of the ceremony itself. The apex of Hollywood’s increasingly extravagant awards season now sounds like a superspreader event: a night when thousands of stars, nominees and guests crowd shoulder-to-shoulder into the Dolby Theater,
while gawking fans and hordes of media jostle outside.
2. That clearly won’t be the case this year, even with a delay. So how exactly can the academy put on an Oscar ceremony without the flourishes that have come to define Hollywood’s Big Night? The answer may lie in Oscar’s own humble beginnings.
3. The academy has become synonymous with its annual awards, but those were, at best, a secondary concern when the group was founded in 1927. The aim was lofty: According to the academy’s rule book, the “Academy Awards of Merit should be considered the highest distinction attainable in the motion picture profession.” But the inaugural event was a good deal less ambitious.
4. The familiar theatricality and suspense of envelopes ripped open to unveil winners was not yet in place; the winners, in fact, had already been printed on the back page of the Academy Bulletin on Feb. 18, 1929, three months before the big night.
5. The first Academy Awards ceremony, held May 16, 1929, was more like a corporate banquet than the star-studded spectacular we expect today. (It merited only a tiny, two-paragraph notice in The New York Times.) The location was the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, with roughly 270 people plunking down $5 per ticket.
“It was just a family affair,” Janet Gaynor, winner of the first Academy Award for best actress, told The Times in 1982. The distribution of the awards, by most accounts, clocked in at about 15 minutes.
6. The second ceremony, held at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub on April 30, 1930, began the tradition of announcing the winners on the spot rather than in advance, thus encouraging all nominees to attend and adding a touch of pizazz to the evening.
7. The first Oscar telecast, on March 19, 1953, was a pivotal point in the transformation of the Academy Awards from a night recognizing entertainment into an entertainment event itself. “I think it became much more important once TV entered the equation,” Karger said. “It wasn’t a private event like it was in the first year, or a radio show, like it was for the next couple of decades. I think once the Academy Awards became a spectacle and became a televised event, that’s when they became even more important.”
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8. That cultural cachet would only grow — as would the ceremony. In the early days of the telecast, organizers used the inflexibility of the television schedule as an excuse to restore brevity to the evening, which had ballooned to three-plus hours by the late 1930s.
9. Initially, the show’s producers complied. But the show crept past the two-hour mark in 1962, and then slowly expanded past three hours by 1974. Producers, hosts and network executives have tried to rein in the show ever since but the annual expectations of an Oscar telecast — comic monologues, song-and-dance numbers, celebrity byplay and copious montages — have rendered such suggestions moot. The simplifications necessary for these COVID-era Oscars may, sadly, strip away such features out of necessity rather than choice.
10. So what should such a ceremony look like? Karger, a faithful viewer who revisits old Oscar telecasts for fun, advises Oscar producers to “study the most recent Primetime Emmys. I think this year’s Emmys did itself a big favor by leaning into the weirdness of it all, all of those gonzo moments and at-home acceptance speeches.”
11. In other words, the best possible Academy Awards ceremony this year might be one that’s more intimate and personal — just like when they began, nearly a century ago. “Isn’t that funny?” Karger chuckled. “The irony of it all is that the Oscars could do themselves a favor in 2021 by looking back to 1929. Who would have thought?”