At the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 270 guests attended a banquet where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out its first awards, later known as the Oscars. Winners had been announced three months earlier, so the ceremony itself, hosted by actor Douglas Fairbanks, lasted only about fifteen minutes. Wings won Best Picture, and tickets cost five dollars, a modest beginning for what would become the film industry's most glamorous annual spectacle.
Unlike today's suspense-driven telecast, the inaugural Academy Awards held no mystery at all. The Academy had published the winners' list to newspapers back in February 1929, three months before the ceremony, so guests at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel's Blossom Room already knew who had won before they sat down to dinner.
The ceremony itself was startlingly brief and intimate by later standards: about 270 people attended, dinner cost five dollars a plate, and the awards presentation, emceed by silent-film star and Academy president Douglas Fairbanks, took roughly fifteen minutes. Wings, a World War I aviation epic, won the award for Outstanding Picture, while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor won the first acting awards.
One category existed only that single year: Best Title Writing, a nod to the intertitles of silent film, rendered obsolete almost immediately as talkies took over Hollywood. The Academy would not attempt to build suspense with sealed envelopes until 1941, after a newspaper leaked results early, transforming what began as a quiet industry dinner into the tightly guarded television spectacle audiences know today.
Key people: Douglas Fairbanks, Emil Jannings, Janet Gaynor