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Academy Award)
The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent film awards in the United States. The Awards are granted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a professional honorary organization which, as of 2003, had a voting membership of 5,816. Actors (with a membership of 1,311) make up the largest voting bloc. The votes have been tabulated and certified by auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers since close to the awards' inception. [1]
The most recent edition, the 78th Academy Awards, took place on March 5, 2006, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
The Oscar
The official name of the Oscar statuette is the Academy Award of Merit. Made of gold-plated britannium on a black marble base, it is 13.5 inches (34 cm) tall, weighs 8.5 lb (3.85 kg) and depicts a knight holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes, signifying the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers and Technicians. [2]. Legend has it that Cedric Gibbons designed the award on a notepad while at a meeting.[citation needed]
The root of the name "Oscar" is contested. Some believe it came from Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, who saw it on a table and said, "it looks just like my uncle Oscar!" Others claim that Bette Davis named it after her first husband.[citation needed] However it came to be, both Oscar and Academy Award are registered trademarks of the Academy. The Academy's domain name is oscars.org and the official Web site for the Awards is at oscar.com.
Since 1950 the statuettes have been legally encumbered by the requirement that neither winners nor their heirs may sell the statuettes without first offering to sell them back to the Academy for $1. [3]
Awards night
The major awards are given out at a live televised ceremony, most commonly in March following the relevant calendar year, and 6 weeks after the announcement of the nominees. This is an elaborate extravaganza, with the invited guests walking up the red carpet in the creations of the most prominent fashion designers of the day. The Academy estimates that 1 billion people around the world watch the awards each year.[citation needed] In a 2006 interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, critic Roger Ebert estimated that the number of viewers was closer to forty million. The advertising revenues realized by the event is the sole source of the Academy's yearly budget.[citation needed]
The ceremony was shown on NBC until 1976. It has since been aired on ABC. The Academy Awards is the only awards show to be televised live coast to coast in the U.S. (aside from those on broadcast cable networks such as MTV and TNT that are seen via digital satellite nationwide); whereas other awards shows are live in the east, but delayed three hours in the west.
After more than 50 years of being held in late March or early April, the ceremonies were moved up to late February or early March starting in 2004, presumably to avoid ratings conflicts with other TV events such as the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
Nominations
Today, according to Rules 2 and 3 of the official Academy Awards Rules, a film has to open in the previous calendar year (from midnight January 1 to midnight December 31) in Los Angeles County, California, to qualify. [4] Rule 2 states that a film must be "feature-length" (defined as 40 minutes) to qualify for an award (except for Short Subject awards, of course). It must also exist either on a 35mm or 70mm film print OR on a 24fps or 48fps progressive scan digital film print with a native resolution no lower than 1280x1024.
The members of the various branches nominate those in their respective fields (actors are nominated by the actors' branch, etc.) while all members may submit nominees for Best Picture. The winners are then determined by a second round of voting in which all members are then allowed to vote in all categories.
Membership
Academy membership may be obtained by one of two ways: a competitive nomination (however, the nominee must be invited to join) or a member may submit a name, seconded by at least two other members, then voted upon by the Board of Governors. The Academy does not publicly disclose its membership, although past press releases have announced the names of those who have been invited to join. If a person not yet a member is nominated in more than one category in a single year, he/she must choose which branch to join when he/she accepts membership.
Awards
Although he never won an Oscar for any of his movie performances, the comedian
Bob Hope received five honorary Oscars for contributions to cinema and humanitarian work.
Academy Award of Merit
Current Awards
Retired Awards
In the first year of the awards, the Best Director category was split into separate Drama and Comedy categories. At times, the Best Original Score category has been split into separate Drama and Comedy/Musical categories. Today, the Best Original Score category is one category. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Cinematography, Art Direction, and Costume Design awards were split into separate categories for black and white and color films.
Special Awards
These awards are voted on by special committees, rather than by the Academy membership as a whole.
Current Awards
Retired Awards
Criticism
All award shows in general receive criticism because of differing tastes. It is simply not possible for everyone to be happy with the winner. But as the most prominent award show and certainly the most important, the Academy Awards over the years and especially in recent years have been the target of a considerable amount of criticism and controversy.
Critics have noted that many Best Picture Academy Award winners in the past have not stood the test of time. Several of these films (Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth being the example often cited), they argue, have aged poorly and have little of the impact they did on initial release.
Furthermore, several of the nominees which have lost Best Picture are regarded as masterpieces by the majority of critics. The most obvious examples being Citizen Kane, a film that was nominated for eight Oscars but won only one (Best Original Screenplay), and has since come to be regarded by movie buffs and academics as one of the greatest films of all time, and The Shawshank Redemption, which didn't win a single award, despite seven nominations and massive critical acclaim (The Shawshank Redemption is, along with The Godfather, one of two films on the IMDb's top 250 list to be rated at 9.0 or greater, and it has the most ratings of any film on the site).
It has also been noted that films that go on to win Best Picture, with few exceptions, are dramas, romances, musicals, epics, or films that deal with serious social and political issues. Because of this critics argue that the Academy is biased against genres such as Science Fiction, Western, Animation, and Horror, regardless of artistic merit.
For instance, in the 78 years of the Academy's history, no Science Fiction film has ever won Best Picture. The only film of the speculative fiction mold to win Best Picture is the third entry of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which won in 2003. To date there have been few Westerns that have won Best Picture. John Ford, a four-time Oscar winner, is today highly regarded for his Western films yet none of the four films for which he won were Westerns.
A related criticism is that actors and actresses who came to prime primarily in comedy films have to succeed in dramatic films in order to be seriously regarded by the Academy. Only five actors have won Best Actor for playing a comedic role.
Another point of contention is the lack of consideration for foreign films. Critics have noted that although the Best Foreign Language Film category exists, very few films from the category have been nominated for Best Picture, regardless of artistic merit.
In recent years, the validity of the Academy Awards has been questioned. Several directors who have been acknowledged as masters such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese have never won the Best Director award.
Finally, in this article, the actual Academy voting process is called into question, bringing light to a subject many in Hollywood are aware of but few discuss.
Academy Award statistics
See also
References
- Gail, K. & Piazza, J. (2002) The Academy Awards the Complete History of Oscar. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.
External links
