What the thing is
The Academy Awards are annual awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented by AMPAS. They assess global cinematic excellence through internal voting.
The Oscars are widely considered the most prestigious awards in the film industry, though they centre predominantly on films produced in Hollywood. The statuette, officially the Academy Award of Merit, shows a knight in Art Deco style holding a sword and standing on a reel of film with five spokes, which stand for the Academy’s original branches: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers and Technicians. Sculptor George Stanley realised Cedric Gibbons’s design.
The voting body numbered 9,905 members in 2024, divided into branches by discipline, with actors the largest at 1,258. Members must be invited to join by the Board of Governors, and the Academy does not publicly disclose its membership.
Where it came from
The first ceremony was held on May 16, 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It began as a private dinner for about 270 people.
Guest tickets cost $5, fifteen statuettes were awarded for work from 1927-28, and the ceremony ran for 15 minutes. At the first ceremony winners were recognised for several films at once: Emil Jannings received the first Best Actor award for two films and, because he had to return to Europe before the ceremony, was given the prize early, making him the first recipient. Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award for three. From the second ceremony performers were nominated for individual films.
The second ceremony, in 1930, was the first broadcast by radio, and the 1953 ceremony was the first televised. NBC carried it until 1960, when ABC took over; the 1966 broadcast was the first in colour. The Academy’s contract with ABC runs through 2028, after which the ceremony will be broadcast exclusively on YouTube from 2029.
The name “Oscar” has no settled origin. There are several claimants, including the Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, Bette Davis, the columnist Sidney Skolsky and the Academy secretary Eleanore Lilleberg, and the claims are disputed: Davis herself later withdrew hers, and Skolsky’s own clipping showed the name was already in use.
What it gets right
It established a peer-reviewed system for judging cinematic merit. It gave AMPAS voting members direct control over recognition. It anchored awards in Hollywood geography from day one.
The procedures are specific. To qualify, a film must open in Los Angeles County in the previous calendar year and play for seven consecutive days, with exceptions for international feature, documentary and short film categories. For most categories the branches vote only on their own field, so directors vote for directors and writers for writers, while all voting members can select Best Picture nominees. A variant of the single transferable vote is used for nominations, and since 2009 the Best Picture winner has been chosen by instant-runoff voting. The Academy keeps an awards czar on staff to advise members on allowed campaigning and to penalise offenders; a producer of The Hurt Locker was disqualified as a producer in the category after urging associates to vote for his film and not the front-runner.
The Oscars have also long had a rule about ownership. Statuettes from before 1950 belong to the recipient, but since then winners must first offer them back to the Academy for $1. In 1992 Harold Russell sold his 1946 supporting actor Oscar for $60,500 to pay for his wife’s medical care, the first Oscar ever sold, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane screenplay Oscar sold for $861,542 in 2011 after his heirs won a court decision.
What it gets wrong
It announced winners three months early in 1929—undermining suspense and ceremony. It relied on newspaper timing rather than live revelation for a decade. It deferred independent vote certification until 1935.
The ceremony has drawn several lasting criticisms. Studios spend heavily on “Oscar season” campaigns, and the director William Friedkin, a former producer of the ceremony, called it “the greatest promotion scheme that any industry ever devised for itself”. The film critic Tim Dirks argued that since the 1980s moneymaking blockbusters have often been Best Picture winners without necessarily being great films with depth. The term “Oscar bait” was coined for the romantic historical epics and biographical dramas that are over-represented among Best Picture nominees. After The Dark Knight and WALL-E were left out at the 81st ceremony, the Academy raised the Best Picture limit from five nominees to ten.
On diversity, only 6.4 percent of nominees since 1929 have been non-white, and that a 2012 Los Angeles Times study of about 88 percent of the voting membership found 94 percent Caucasian and 77 percent male. In 2016 the Academy launched an initiative to expand its membership and increase diversity. Some winners have refused the award, among them Dudley Nichols, George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, and the Academy has revoked nominations before the ceremony, as it did for The Godfather’s score.
Why it matters now
It remains the dominant metric of legitimacy in film culture—not because it is fair or representative, but because its procedures became the template for all subsequent industry awards.
Its audience has fallen. The 93rd ceremony in 2021 drew 10.4 million viewers, the lowest Nielsen has recorded since it began counting in 1974, against 23.6 million for the 92nd. The most-watched ceremony by Nielsen rating was the 42nd, in 1970, with a 43.4 percent household rating. The Academy announced on December 17, 2025 that YouTube had acquired the rights from the 101st ceremony in 2029, under a contract running through 2033. The focus of glamour has also shifted from the Oscars to the Met Gala.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you want to understand how film’s institutional authority was built, not celebrated.
