The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, are the most prestigious and popular film awards. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science or AMPAS situated in Beverly Hills, California started it in May 1929. PricewaterhouseCoopers since 1935 have managed the balloting process. In 1941 the confidential envelope system started which exists till this date. This was how the phrase “the envelope please” became famous. The members of this academy are invited by the Board of Governors to join. The membership has fifteen branches each based on the different categories of awards.

The gold plated statuettes are also presented as the Academy Award of Merit. It has a black metal base and weights 8.5 lb and 13.5 inch tall knight holding a crusader’s sword standing over a film reel with five spokes, which represent the five main categories of awards. It was created by George Stanley and Alex Smith and since then the Oscars have been manipulated only once. Forty Oscars are made for each annual Academy Awards in Chicago, Illinois. They are presented every year for movies, which have been produced in the last twelve months. The seventeen-month qualifying period was introduced to consider films released in a single calendar year in the year 1932. And since then this time period has been taken into consideration. The minimum length of the movie should be forty minutes and the minimum resolution should be 1280×720 so as to qualify as a feature-length.

The Academy Awards were held on Thursdays until 1954. From 1959 – 1998 they were held on Mondays except for few exceptions. It started to be held on Sundays from 1999. For nearly sixty years the Academy Awards were held in later March or early April. Since 2004 it is being held in late February or early March. The very first awards ceremony was held at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood. The Ambassador Hotel and Biltmore Hotel were the venues till early 1940s. Next venue was Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which was followed by the Shrine Auditorium. In 1949 the awards were presented at the Academy Award Theater. For the next ten years the venue was Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Next in line was Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica. Then the ceremony was shifted back to Los Angeles in 1968 at the Los Angeles Music Center and Shrine Auditorium and it was held there until 1988. In 2002 it was finally shifted to Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

Oscars recognizes talents in field such as acting, screenwriting, production, direction and technician. The awards categories can be broadly described as Best Production award, Best Director award, Best Actor award, Best Actress award, Best Supporting actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay award. The only three movies that have won awards in all the categories are “It Happened One Night”,” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Silence of the Lambs”. This achievement is also known as the Big Five or Oscar Grand Slam. Three films hold the record for winning most number of Oscars, which are “Ben-Hur” in 1959, “Titanic” in 1997 and “The Return of the King” in 2003. On the awards night, invitees walk the red carpet in their best dresses, which create a fashion statement. The whole ceremony is broadcasted live on television all over America except Hawaii and Alaska, the first ever broadcast was in 1953 on NBC channel. There are performances by the nominees of the Best Original Song category and countless other performances. The telecast attracts over a billion viewers from all over the world as claimed by the Academy.

The Lumiere Brothers

The french duo of Louis (October 5, 1864 – June 6, 1948)  & Auguste (October 19, 1862 – April 10, 1954) Lumiere did not invent cinema, but they are considered the founding fathers of modern film for creating the primitive motion-picture projector they patented in 1885. The brothers were inspired by the work of American inventor Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931), who in 1893 had unveiled a machine called the Kinetoscope, which allowed viewers to watch short films by peering into a wooden box that held the device’s components.

The Lumieres, whose family manufactured photographic equiptment and supplies, improved on the Kenetoscope with the Cinematographe, a lightweight, hand-cranked apparatus that was both a camera and a projector. And unlike the Kenetoscope, which allowed only one viewer to watch the moving pictures, the Cinematographe could project movies onto a screen, allowing members of an audience to watch a movie together.

The Lumieres patented the Cinematographe in February 1895, and many historians consider December 18, 1895, to be the birthday of cinema. On that day, the Lumiere brothers projected films for the first time for a paying audience at the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The program included ten films — among them Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895) — and lasted about twenty minutes.

In 1886, the brothers took the Cinematographe and their films on a world tour, including stops in London and New York City. According to legend, some spectators were so spooked by Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) — which was a single shot of a train as it approached a station from the background — that they ran away in terror.

By 1900, the brothers had created 2,000 films. But believing that “cenima is an invention without any future,” the brothers did not sell their camera to other filmmakers and went on to focus their efforts on still photography.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Louis Lumiere was a trained physicist.
2. Auguste Lumiere ran the family business, which manufactured photographic equipment and supplies.
3. The Lumieres hired a pianist to provide live musical accompaniment to their short movies at their first screening in Paris.