Before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences became synonymous with an awards ceremony, a group of intensely rivalrous producers plotted to organize under the tasseled flag of an academy to promote “harmony” across the ranks of the motion picture industry and to counteract the threat of organized revolt by the 42,000 workers involved in moviemaking in the late-1920s: actors, costumers, carpenters, and others. (Though in the era of silent films, those involved in sound design and recording were not yet included in this union, they would later join the group.) The nascent craft guilds of the Hollywood enterprise were in fierce talks with the studios over a new contract, and studio heads feared actors, writers, and directors might start to question their own working conditions. The academy was supposed to ease the tensions between labor and management by uniting them under the same banner. In this role, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a fancy-sounding body of preemptive strike busters. Louis B. Mayer, who hatched the plan (and reveled in saying so), “knew what unrestricted labor could get him: a sparkling new beach house in six weeks,” Schulman notes.
At the same time, the tenuously organized powers in the academy were able to put on a show of high-minded unity to prevent government censorship and tamp down fears that the ostensible moral laxity of their films’ content could corrupt the minds and souls of moviegoers and incite havoc in the streets. “The world is more influenced by the little group in this room tonight than by any other power in the world,” announced director-producer Cecil B. DeMille at the inaugural Academy banquet. “Our ideals have got to be high. There was a little group like this that gathered in another little room, and the result was the United States of America.”
The Awards of Merit came to stand for Hollywood’s dedication to artistic excellence, if not its moral purity, and over time became the Academy’s primary focus. The first awards ceremony was held in the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles on May 16, 1929. After a decade of the Academy’s ham-handed attempts to arbitrate disputes between movie-industry labor and studio bosses (many of whom were in the Academy), the latter party threw up their hands in 1937, when the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act protecting the right of labor to organize. The academy abandoned its fantasy of being “Hollywood’s League of Nations,” as Schulman puts it, and became “little more than the body that gave out statuettes.” More significantly, perhaps, it effectively relinquished control over the selection of the winners, handing off the balloting process to the Screen Actors Guild, whose membership was 15 times that of the Academy. If the latter was to be no more than a body that gave out statuettes, then the giving-out could be done more democratically.