Academy Award Winners: The First 50 Years

The first installment in this engrossing series on the history of the first half century in cinematic arts, begins back in 1928, and chronicles the slow transition of the legendary awards ceremony from a discreet and exclusive dinner to an internationally broadcast spectacle full of speeches, performances, and gossip coverage for all niches of film lovers throughout the world.

With the American film industry expanding and taking an increasingly significant cultural role, the Golden Age of Hollywood was a pivotal period for the films produced during the time, as well as for the lavish award ceremonies that would become a significant staple of Hollywood culture.

1939 was a pivotal year for Hollywood as an industry. As the trajectory of cinema and its grasp expanded and segued from phase to phase, 1939 served a visible barrier year, with the industry being decidedly defined by its statures before and after such a transitional year.

World War II served as a turning point for virtually all American industries throughout the long and grueling multiyear span of violence. Much like the rest of the country, the American film industry was forced to respond to the international war's costs on every element of its livelihood: funding, public interest, consumers, etc.

The postwar years affected Hollywood as much as it did any other American industry during those pivotal transition years as America worked to return to its former normalcy.

A new wave of ideas and techniques took hold of the perpetually transforming film industry in the years following the war, with a new generation of fresh and hungry stars finding their own places in the vacuum of reconstruction the industry faced.

The 50's saw a Renaissance of sorts in technological innovations, which allowed a new era of cinema never before possible. Thanks to advents in virtually all facets of production, films were capable of depictions and experiences not even imaginable before.

In the years following the century's midpoint, Hollywood turned to making decidedly epic films by design, with aims for quintessential greatness resulting in equally epic Academy Awards ceremonies full of impossible choices between innumerable deserving nominees.

The start of the 1960's sparked a drastic change in the studio system, the studios, and the trajectory of the industry as a whole, prompting production on some of the most envelope-pushing works of all time.

Cultural changes in art appreciation and acceptability of indecency enabled a time of pivotal transition in Hollywood, resulting in an era of challenging artistic feats with unprecedented vulgarity, lewdness, and other elements not deemed permissable prior.