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1939 (12th) Academy Awards banquet.
Photograph courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library. |
The Academy Awards have been held annually since 1929, and the Academy Film Archive’s collection of complete shows begin with the 21st Awards in March 1949. The Margaret Herrick Library holds audio recordings of radio broadcasts from earlier ceremonies, as well as photographs and other paper materials. Small segments of Awards presentations prior to the 21st do exist in many newsreel collections, such as the Hearst collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
The Academy Film Archive holds a complete copy of every Academy Awards telecast beginning with the 21st annual event. For shows between 1949 and 1989, the show itself is the only item in the collection, but beginning in 1990, the amount of additional footage in the collection increases steadily. For the most recent Awards season, for example, the Archive not only holds the show as it was seen by viewers, but also footage of the nominations announcements, red carpet arrivals, backstage interviews with the winners, the Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation, the Governors Ball, and other material covering the Awards season, from the nominations to the post-ceremony events.
One of the lesser-known components of the Academy Awards Collection pertains to the Scientific and Technical Awards. While most viewers only see a two-minute recap segment of these presentations during the Academy Awards telecast, the Academy has been recording the Sci-Tech presentations in their entirety since the 61st Awards in March 1989. The honorees run the gamut from scientists who have made improvements in film stocks and camera lenses to technicians who have perfected fog machines, cool suits, and bluescreen and computer technology.
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The red carpet during the 77th Annual Academy Awards. |
The Academy Awards Collection also contains electronic press kits (EPKs) and their production materials. The Archive holds copies of EPKs put together for show publicity dating to the 59th Awards in March, 1987. These press kits include not only clips from the previous three telecasts and the trailer for the show, but also featurettes ranging from interviews with the show’s producer, director and host to previews of the show’s set design and Governors Ball. In some cases, the Archive also holds the raw footage of interviews with hosts and producers such as Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Gil Cates.
The Academy Awards Collection also contains backstage interviews with winners, recorded just minutes after they have walked off the stage with their statuettes in hand. Viewers at home often get small excerpts from these interviews in news coverage, but the Archive has unedited tapes of all of them. For more recent years, tapes from the Nominees Luncheon, containing interviews with Acting and Directing nominees, have also been added to the collection.
Since the 1980s, the Academy has held a Foreign Language Film Award Nominees Symposium the day before the Awards show, taking advantage of the arrival of many talented foreign directors from overseas for the Academy Awards presentation."The Academy Awards Collection contains tapes of this symposium, which feature clips from the year’s nominated foreign language films followed by a panel discussion with the directors of the films.
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