On May 16, 1929, about 270 people sat down to a quiet dinner in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Tickets cost five dollars. There was no live broadcast, no red carpet, and no surprise - the winners had been announced in the newspaper three months earlier. After dessert, the host stood up and started handing out little gold statues. The whole ceremony lasted just 15 minutes. That was the first-ever Academy Awards, the start of what the world now calls the Oscars.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had been founded only two years before, in 1927, to celebrate the booming movie industry. The Best Picture winner that first year was a silent film called Wings, about World War I pilots, and the Best Actor went to Emil Jannings, who had already gone back to Germany and couldn't even pick up his statue. The famous gold trophy was designed by an art director named Cedric Gibbons. Legend says it got its nickname when a librarian remarked that it looked like her Uncle Oscar.
The ceremony has grown a little since then. Today it stretches over three hours, is watched by tens of millions of people around the world, and is packed with movie stars in fancy gowns and tuxedos. Winners give long, emotional speeches. There are sometimes shocking upsets, surprise hugs, and the occasional onstage drama. But the basic idea is still the same as it was in that hotel ballroom in 1929 - a chance for filmmakers to celebrate the best of an art form that didn't even exist a hundred and fifty years ago.
