history of oscar(چهارشنبه 86 آذر 21 ساعت 11:11 عصر )

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was dreamed up by mogul Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, to lend respectability and status to the movie industry, the reputation of which was tarnished during the "Roaring Twenties." Formed on 4 May 1927, it was designed to "raise the cultural, educational and scientific standards" of film, a statement calculated to placate those who saw the movies as having a corrupting effect on American morals and ideals.

Until 1931, the thirteen-and-a-half inch tall, eight-pound figure of a man with a crusader"s sword, standing thoughtlessly on a reel of film, was known merely as The Statuette. Legend has it that the Academy librarian, Margaret Herrick, chanced to remark on studying it: "Why, he looks just like my Uncle Oscar!" Just as likely is the competing claim that Bette Davis named it after her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr. But whatever the truth behind its christening, the name has stuck, and people have always been more comfortable using the affectionate if slightly disreputable nickname of "Oscar" to describe an Academy Award. The double Oscar^®-winning writer Frances Marion once described the figurine as "a perfect symbol of the picture business; a powerful athletic body clutching a gleaming sword, with half of his head, that part which held the brains, completely sliced off."

"Oscar^®" was designed in a few minutes on a tablecloth at Hollywood"s Biltmore Hotel by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons (11-times recipient of his own creation), executed by sculptor George Stanley and manufactured by the Dodge Trophy Co. of Crystal Lake, IL. The value of the gold-plated statuette is around $250, but winners pledge never to sell it except back to the Academy -- a rule that has been broken on a handful of occasions, with Oscars^® such as Vivien Leigh"s for Scarlett O"Hara fetching large sums at auction. Oscar"s^® value at the box office is, however, inestimable. So important is it as a means of increasing business that movie studios spend up to $1 million publicizing their nominated properties.

One of the first functions of the 36 Charter members of the Academy, who included Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. De Mille, Irving G. Thalberg and Raoul Walsh, was to organize the annual achievement awards. For the first nine years, only Academy members determined the awards, but in 1937 voting was extended to some 15,000 people in the movie industry, although the nominations were limited to Academy members. Later, the procedure was reversed, with the industry at large selecting the nominations and the Academy the winners. From 1957 to the present day all voting has been confined to the Academy. The latter is divided into several branches -- acting, writing, and so on. These decide on the five nominees for their particular category, but all branches select the Best Picture nominees. The Best Foreign Language film is selected by the entire Academy membership. Any country can submit films for competition, but only one per nation can be nominated in a particular year. (France, the first major film pioneering country, has been the most often favored winner.)

Over the years there have been variations in designations of awards and increases in the categories due to changes in techniques and attitudes, but the general lines laid down for the reward of excellence have remained. The Awards came into being simultaneously with the birth of sound, so that the very first honors represented a valedictory homage to the silent cinema. By the second year, the award for Title Writing had disappeared and, the following year, a Sound Recording category was added, while Best Song and Best Score were first recognized in 1934. Despite the fact that the 1930s saw the acme of fashion in Hollywood, costume designers had to wait until 1948 for inclusion, and the ceremony was in its ninth year before the important contribution of supporting players was acknowledged. Arthur Freed, the composer and producer of musicals, and the Academy"s president from 1963-1967, was quoted as saying that the awards "honor artistic achievement, with little regard for popularity, box-office success or other yardsticks applied by the critics or the general public." Despite many controversial judgments, and occasional submissions to "other yardsticks," the Academy, as a whole, has maintained those standards. At the same time, it has seldom cut itself off from public taste, and has acknowledged Hollywood"s greatest strength: the manufacture of superbly crafted mass entertainment.

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Cinema(پنج شنبه 86 آذر 15 ساعت 11:34 عصر )

Cinema can refer to the medium of film, i.e. motion pictures or movies the building in which films are shown, i.e. a movie theater the art of cinematography

history of cinema

Cinema by country