This wonderful book is often funny, sometimes shocking, and always incredibly informative as we get the inside story at the Academy, from its humble beginnings at the Biltmore, to its eventual phenomenal industry success.
With the skill and wit of a great story teller, Bruce Davis transports us into the secret boardrooms filled with powerful moguls and charismatic stars, the screenwriters and directors, the cinematographers and visionary scientists who frame-by-frame crafted the movies into the art form we cherish today. Here is the fascinating tale of how the coveted golden statuette of Oscar almost wasn’t and came to be. How I wish I had known this history when I joined the Academy. Pure magic!
"If you happen to care about the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (at least in its first fifty years), you’ll have no shortage of reasons to read Bruce Davis’ forthcoming book, The Academy and the Award."
Bruce Davis' new book, The Academy and the Award, provides movie fans, film historians, and all those interested in American arts and culture with the first-ever comprehensive account of the history and evolution of the academy. . . . Davis is not only a supremely confident guide to the Oscars’ history but an engaging and entertaining narrator as well. His prose is consistently colorful and often novelistic in its vivid scene-setting and descriptive detail.
"That this Hollywood institution survived its first tumultuous decade is a tale which Davis recounts with wit and discernment. His erudition is icing on the cake: what could have been dry and academic is instead a highly readable book that can lay claim to being definitive."
With a discerning eye and a wealth of experience, Bruce Davis transforms what could have been dry and academic into an erudite and witty saga. He buries a number of myths and rumors surrounding the Oscars, and reveals how the organization survived its chaotic early years. The Academy and the Award is a major contribution to Hollywood history—and a great read.
Authoritative doesn’t begin to describe the comprehensive Hollywood history Davis unfolds in The Academy and the Award. Not the usual breezy picture book, this is a meticulously researched and eye-opening account by a veteran member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which, of course, hands out the Oscars every year. As the Academy nears its first century, surprisingly this is only the first truly in-depth history.
Davis, whose book is subtitled ‘The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ focuses on the organization’s formative years, ‘an early life that deserves a bildungsroman.’”
The Academy’s history is inextricable from Hollywood’s, and The Academy and the Award is a vital contribution and necessary step to documenting the organization and the impact of its Academy Awards.”
The text often put me in the moment . . . . Fleshing the early history is difficult from just organization records, but Davis presents an amazingly full picture of each era of the Academy.
There are few people who know (and can explain) the inner machinations of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but if anyone can do it, Bruce Davis is that man. I am thrilled that there is finally a serious history of the organization and the people behind it, with names that you'll recognize and those you won't. This is the definitive history of the Academy: it deserves a place on one's shelf, or inside one's Kindle. Mr. Davis’s magnum opus is essential reading for any serious cinephile.
Wide ranging in his objective perspective, but always humanly intimate, Davis examines the in-house records of the Board of Governors, memos of its Presidents, and letters from the Academy’s more activist members, with much added flavoring and gossip. Davis’s seminal history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reads with all the honed stagecraft and drama of an Oscar nominated screenplay.
This account by a former executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an interesting and detailed one. . . . How did the Oscar get its name? What exactly are the Jean Hersholt and Irving Thalberg awards? Almost as intriguing are the sections about the extremely short presidential term of Bette Davis (she had a cup of coffee in the role, leading only one board meeting) and an explanation of how the Oscar statuette was designed.
An erudite and witty look at the Academy’s history, The Academy and the Award is a vital chronicle of film history that will be sought after by American history aficionados and film fanatics alike. Davis has combined meticulous research with a dynamic narrative to reveal the compelling personalities of the actors, writers, directors, and filmmakers who comprised the Academy during its formative era.
[Davis’s] academic background and years at the Academy made him the ideal writer for this invaluable book.
In this engrossing behind-the-scenes look at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the work it does during all five seasons—ahem, including awards—by a former Academy executive director, the real nights and bolts of how the Hollywood machine works is explained in insightful, and sometimes deliciously dishy detail.
"Film historians and others digging for a deeper vein of Oscar knowledge than mere trivia will turn up many nuggets in The Academy and the Award, which focuses on the initial three decades in the corporate life of the sword-wielding statuette. Oscar would be lucky to have as keen and even-handed a historian as Davis to explore its next era."
I recommend this book to everyone who loves the movies and the Oscars!
"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."
"A tremendously in-depth history"
In this entertaining, well-researched history, Bruce Davis traces how a marginal organization that teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for years became a major cultural institution that awards a coveted prize.
"An author with a deep affinity for and knowledge of movies and how they’re honored tells us all about Oscar. Davis keeps things both informative and entertaining with plenty of interesting factoids."
09/01/2022
The story of the first 50 years (1927–77) of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and is fascinating, and the Academy's former executive director Davis (who worked there for 30 years) is the ideal person to write it. Drawing on previously ignored documents, most notably the extensive board minutes, he lays to rest many myths. Cedric Gibbons didn't first sketch Oscar on a tablecloth during dinner at the Biltmore. Mexican heartthrob Emilio Fernandez didn't model the original statue. None of three stories about how the Oscar got its name convinces. (Davis offers a possible fourth.) One reason the Academy came into existence in 1927 was that movie mogul Louis B. Mayer was worried about unions. But other pressures pushed studios and artists toward a common end. The Jazz Singer premiered that year, creating a demand for sound technicians the industry didn't have and performance standards not yet established. Local censorship was a problem with theater owners chopping pieces from films as they moved from first- to second-run theaters. An intriguing factoid: there's never been a year when award categories and rules haven't changed somehow. VERDICT A book of wide appeal, starting but not ending with film buffs.—David Keymer
2022-07-05
A history of the world’s most famous movie awards and the organization that controls them.
The Oscar is “the single best-known work of twentieth-century sculpture,” yet “the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has never been well understood,” writes Davis, who was the Academy’s executive director for more than 20 years. He aims to improve that understanding with this book. The author focuses on the Academy’s first 30 years, from its founding in 1927 at the instigation of Louis B. Mayer, who saw the nascent Academy “as a means of elevating the public perception of film to the level of long-acknowledged art forms,” through the mid-1950s, when Academy governors worried about the threat from “the just-stirring young giant of television.” Davis covers a variety of significant events in the organization’s history, including battles with unions and guilds, the appointment of Postmaster General Will Hays to bring “wholesomeness” to the industry after its 1920s scandals, and the period in 1933 when the Academy “was essentially broke.” Technical and financial details will seem dry to anyone uninterested in dues and expenses, bylaws, building refurbishments, and the like. The best sections are those pertaining to celebrities and the Oscar itself. Davis cites competing stories of how the Oscar got its name, the most entertaining of which is Bette Davis’ claim (no relation) that she gave it her husband’s middle name because the statuette and her husband had similar backsides. Many stories are satisfyingly ribald, as when Davis notes the irony of Hays being set up in a building that had “pointedly erotic postures and the full-frontal nudity of both sexes” on the fire-escape frieze, with figures that are clearly making a film. “There is no way,” writes the author, “for a modern viewer to avoid the impression that the subject is a porn shoot in the Valley.”
A fond look at the genesis and growing pains of the world’s foremost film organization.
