After serving as executive director of the Academy for over 20 years, Bruce Davis has penned the definitive history of the Academy Awards, from their awkward inception to the present. Davis was granted unprecedented access to the Academy archives for this compelling read about the way the Oscars work. Here, in the epilogue to his book The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, he writes about the future of the Academy Awards.
On May 11, 1977, exactly fifty years after its Organizational Banquet, the Academy returned to the Biltmore’s Crystal Ballroom for a luncheon to mark the anniversary. President Walter Mirisch presided, Bob Hope emceed, and a spirited party of celebrants assembled. A dozen attendees who had signed on with the Academy half a century earlier were among the group, and they went home having been declared Life Members of the organization.
The Academy Awards were well established as a brilliant international phenomenon by then, their outcomes breathlessly anticipated by vast television audiences that annually drove their ratings into the stratosphere. Although the network license fees were well short of what the Academy’s second half century would bring, the one-day-a-year windfall had already relieved the organization of any really pressing financial concerns, and those twelve longtime members may have been the only people at the party who looked at the lustrous Academy and thought back to a time when the organization had been forced to fight its way through hardscrabble beginnings.
