The Academy Awards has been around since 1929 when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science started it. This is a highly popular award ceremony and grew so quickly that they needed to subcontract the balloting to PricewaterhouseCoopers by 1935. It was in 1941 that PricewaterhouseCoopers would introduce the popular secret envelop which is still in use today.

Featuring 5 main categories but a total of 15 in all, the Academy Awards annually hands out an award of merit that features a knight with a sword standing un top of a five spoke reel of film which is all sitting on a black base. The statuette itself is 8 pounds and 13.5 inches tall. The members in charge of running the ceremony are selected and invited to join by the Board of Governors to be part of this popular event.

The initial award which has become known simply as Oscar, was initially created by Alex Smith and George Stanley. Today they are seen almost exactly as they were when they were first created other then a single change. Every year there are only 40 of these Oscars that are produced for the ceremony.

When the award were first created, in order for a film to be eligible for an award it had to have been made in the previous 12 month period. Due to the war though, this was changed to 16 months back in 1932 and has yet to have been reversed. Furthermore, no film under 40 minutes in length or with a resolution less then 1280 x 720 can be considered for an Oscar as it would not be considered full-length.

Unlike the Grammy Awards, the Oscars have been in many different venues since its establishment and have been hosted on varying months of the year as well. Until 1954, the awards were always held on Thursdays after which they were moved to Mondays until 1999 and now are held on a Sunday.

The Oscars and the movie industry in general have always been surrounded by glamour and magic. Who would ever have thought when it all started that we would be able to grasp a little bit of that glamour in our own homes with the advent of unlimited dvd rental.

It is amazing how many venues the Academy Awards have been held at. They started off with the first ceremony being in the Hotel Roosevelt, after which it would rotate between both the Biltmore Hotel and the Ambassador Hotel. It would stay in this rotation until the 1940s when it would be moved to Grauman’s Chinese followed by the Shrine Auditorium.

Then the venues would be changed to the Grauman’s Chinese Theater, followed by the Shrine Auditorium and then in 1949, the Academy Award Theater. The Pantages Theater would stay the home for the next decade after which the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium would become its home. Until 1988, the Los Angeles Music Center along with the Shrine Auditorium would become the place for the awards here it was finally moved to the Kodak Theater.

Every year there are more then a billion people who will tune in to the Oscars worldwide. They may not always agree with what the world thinks is the best films of the yea, but one thing everyone has in common is that the glitter and glamour that makes Hollywood so attractive draws people to see who will win the top awards.