The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press. Fine in Near Fine dj. (c.2022). First Edition. Hardcover. [no discernible wear to book; the jacket shows just a touch of surface wear on the front panel, and has a very short diagonal wrinkle at the upper corner of the front flap]. (B&W photographs) A thorough, deeply-researched and very readable account of the founding and growth of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, written by its former Executive Director, who was granted access to archival records that had previously been unavailable to scholars and historians. Although this is in no way a memoir -- it chronicles only the Academy's first (truncated) half-century, concluding more or less with the death of Margaret Herrick (namesake of the Academy's research library, and herself an influential figure in Academy history) in 1976, five years before Davis joined the organization -- the perspective he gained from his thirty years at the place (the last twenty at its helm) proved invaluable to his telling of its early history. (He confines his comments about more recent developments, and on topics such as the Oscar telecast's declining audience, to a four-page Epilogue.) And on a personal note, I can testify from my own observation of the author's research, to his deep concern for "getting the facts straight" and cutting through a lot of the mythology that's grown up around the Academy's history; his analysis of the various claimants to having first dubbed the Academy Award statuette "Oscar," in particular, is as close to definitive as we're ever likely to get. . (Inventory #: 29014)