It happened today - May 16, 2015

Already by the late 1950s the Oscars were suffering from progress 

On May 16, 1929, the first “Oscars”, formally the “Academy Awards of Merit,” were handed out. At a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in front of about 270 people who had paid $5 ($69 today) for a ticket. To winners announced 3 months earlier. Fifteen awards were handed out and it took 15 minutes.

Today the Oscars, first televised in 1953, attract an international audience in more than 200 countries, in a lavish orgy of materialistic and moralistic self-congratulation over the move from duds like Casablanca to artistic triumphs like Fast and Furious 7.

We call this progress.

 

It happened todayJohn Robson