In a post about the only silent film to ever win Best Picture, Perrin Drumm remembers how simple the show used to be:
It was around this time eighty-three years ago that the first winners of the Academy Award of Merit were notified, via telegraph, even though it would be another three months before the ceremony itself took place—an event that drew an audience of only 270 people, each of whom paid five dollars for a private dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel. While guests dined on filet of sole sauté au buerre and half-broiled chicken on toast, master of ceremonies Douglas Fairbanks dispensed with the awards in a mere fifteen minutes. There were no speeches and no cameras. It was the only untelevised Academy Awards in history.
Brent Cox spotlights a very different moment in Oscar history, the streaker of 1974. Update from a reader:
The Academy Awards were first telecast in *1953*; the ceremony had been held over twenty years by then. The first ceremony was the only one not *broadcast*; the radio picked it up the following year.
The Dish 