20th annual Academy Awards celebrated

Hollywood’s elite braved freezing temperatures and strong winds to attend the
20th annual Academy Awards ceremony, which took place on this day in 1948 at the
Shrine Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles, California.

The first Academy Awards had been given out in May 1929, in a banquet held at
the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. They were the preeminent honors in the
motion-picture industry, awarded by the fledgling non-profit organization the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, formed in 1927. The actual awards
were gold statuettes, designed by Cedric Gibbons and sculpted by George Stanley;
the were dubbed “Oscars” after 1931, when a secretary at the Academy noted the
statuette’s resemblance to her Uncle Oscar.

For the 20th anniversary of the Academy Awards, producers of the ceremony
turned the stage at the Shrine Auditorium into an enormous birthday cake. Twenty
large-scale Oscar statuettes stood in place of the candles. In addition to
celebrating the best in film produced in the year 1947, and the 20th anniversary
of its organization, the Academy was celebrating the film industry itself and
how far it had come in the past two decades. In 1929, Hollywood was going
through the sometimes painful transition from silent film to “talkies.” As
studios struggled with technical difficulties with sound recording and editing,
some of silent film’s biggest stars were pushed out of the limelight due to
their inability to learn lines, their heavy foreign accents or
less-than-melodious voices. The economic structure of Hollywood was also
changing, as smaller studios like 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers built
themselves into major corporations in order to compete with already-established
powerhouses such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount.

In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, the Hollywood studio system
produced and distributed more than 500 films. In an average week, 90 million
Americans (out of a total population of 151 million) went to see a movie, paying
around 40 cents for a single ticket. At the Shrine on that March night, the
Oscar for Best Picture of 1947 went to Gentleman’s Agreement, produced by
Fox. The film starred Gregory Peck as a journalist who poses as a Jewish man in
order to investigate and report firsthand on anti-Semitism in America.
Gentleman’s Agreement was an example of a new type of film that came out
of Hollywood in the post-World War II years. Far removed from a typical genre
film (musical, Western, gangster, etc.), it was a realistic, socially conscious
drama that reflected some of the country’s darker realities. The film’s
director, Elia Kazan, a former stage director, took home the Best Director
Oscar.

As in 1929, the movie industry stood at another crossroads in 1948. Aside
from the threat of a new, exciting entertainment medium--television--looming on
the horizon, Hollywood was in the grip of anxiety over the attempts of the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to root out Communist influence in the
movie industry. For his part, Kazan earned the enduring contempt of many of his
peers in 1952, when he complied with HUAC’s request to give the names of
colleagues in New York City’s Group Theater who had been secret members of the
Communist Party. The era of the so-called “Red Scare” would change Hollywood
forever, as the studios began blacklisting suspected Communists under pressure
from Washington, ending the careers of many talented artists.