On May 16, 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences handed out its first awards, at a dinner party for
around 250 people held in the Blossom Room of the
Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California.

The brainchild of Louis B. Mayer, head of the powerful MGM
film studio, the Academy was organized in May 1927 as a
non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and
improvement of the film industry.

Its first president and the host of the May 1929 ceremony was
the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Unlike today, the winners
of the first Oscars—as the coveted gold-plated statuettes
later became known—were announced before the awards
ceremony itself.

The first official Best Picture winner was Wings, directed by
William Wellman. The most expensive movie of its time, with
a budget of $2 million.
   

Oscar-winning actor known for playing intense, often violent
characters in "The Godfather," "Dog Day Afternoon" and
"Serpico" is 85 today.

Pacino has won and been nominated for many awards during
his acting career, including nine Oscar nominations. He won
a Best Actor award for “Scent of a Woman” in 1992.

1992

Adrien Brody has won the Academy Award for Best Actor
twice for his portrayal of Holocaust survivors: Polish pianist
Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski‘s war drama The
Pianist (2002) and Hungarian brutalist architect László Tóth
in Brady Corbet‘s period epic The Brutalist (2024).

The former made him the category’s youngest winner, at age
29. He has received several other accolades, including a
Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA Award with nominations
for three Primetime Emmy Awards.

2004

    
SANDY KOZEL
   

Thomas Jefferson (April 13 April 2], 1743 – July 4, 1826)

Future President Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration
of Independence and the nation’s preeminent political theorist, 
was born on April 13, 1743.

He was the third president of the United States from 1801 to
1809 and the nation’s first U.S. secretary of state under
George Washington.

On April 7, 1970, the legendary actor John Wayne won his
first—and only—acting Academy Award, for his star turn
in the director Henry Hathaway’s Western True Grit.

Wayne appeared in some 150 movies over the course of
his long and storied career. He established his tough,
rugged, uniquely American screen persona most vividly
in the many acclaimed films he made for the directors
John Ford and Howard Hawks from the late 1940s into the
early 1960s.

He earned his first Oscar nomination, in the Best Actor
category, for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). The Alamo (1960),
which Wayne produced, directed and starred in, earned a
Best Picture nomination.

Wayne’s Oscar for True Grit at the 42nd annual Academy
Awards in 1970 was generally considered to be a largely
sentimental win, and a long-overdue reward for one of
Hollywood’s most enduring performers.

The Academy had failed to even nominate Wayne for any
of his most celebrated performances, in films such as
Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), The Quiet Man (1952),
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and especially
Ford’s The Searchers (1956), considered by many to be
the greatest Western ever made.