The notion of presenting awards honoring movies started in the 1920s. The idea of showing films in a body for comparative -- and even competitive -- purposes began slightly later. In a sense, these two developments were a natural product of the evolution of film. From the first decade of the twentieth century, it was clear that the medium held huge potential as a serious artistic and creative force; and midway through the second decade, as the American movie industry -- already the most robust in the world -- began realizing this potential through the work of filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, it was clear that the medium would grow along those lines, with ever-more sophisticated releases each year from all over the world. In the silent days, of course, films were truly international in nature, with no serious language barriers.

The Academy Awards, the oldest of all the major film awards, began in the twilight of the silent era. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed on May 4, 1927 for the expressed purpose of improving "the artistic quality of the film medium." Comprised of industry insiders, artists, craftsmen, and employees, AMPAS probably would never have attracted much more attention than, say, an organization of architects and designers, but for the fact that it honored very well-known figures such as actors and actresses, whose work captured the imagination of millions. The first Academy Awards were presented on May 16, 1929, honoring the films and performers of 1927 and 1928 in what was essentially an industry celebration of itself. The honorees in that first ceremony, which took less than 30 minutes and had no live media coverage (radio coverage of the awards began in 1930, and television began carrying the awards ceremony in 1953) included a brace of figures who are scarcely remembered at the other end of the century -- Emil Jannings as "Best Actor," for his performances in The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command; Janet Gaynor as "Best Actress" for her work in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise; Frank Borzage as "Best Director" for Seventh Heaven. Ironically, the figure honored that night whose work is probably best known to audiences in the 1990s was Lewis Milestone, who received an Academy Award in a category -- "Best Comedy Director," for Two Arabian Knights (1927) -- that was immediately abandoned. The "Best Picture" honors went to Wings, a 1927 silent drama set during World War I directed by William Wellman and starring Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, and Clara Bow.

That group of winners is worth looking at more closely, if only for the ironies surrounding their recognition today. Wings is the only one of the movies mentioned that is reasonably well-known today, principally because of its riveting aerial combat sequences (director Wellman had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I) and, somewhat less so, for the sprightly performance of Clara Bow as a plucky ambulance driver and a brief star-making cameo by a young Gary Cooper. Although it is somewhat slow dramatically, it holds up reasonably well and has been revived regularly through the decades in theaters and even on television. It received a fresh lease on life on home video during the 1980s with a newly recorded digital music track and subsequently became the first laserdisc released in the United States with full digital sound.

Emil Jannings' career scarcely survived the arrival of sound in motion pictures and is best remembered today for his performance not in either of the Hollywood movies for which he won an Academy Award, but for his work as the doomed teacher in the German-produced The Blue Angel, which is itself best remembered for having launched Marlene Dietrich to stardom. Janet Gaynor is most well-remembered today for her performance as Vicky Lester in the 1937 version of A Star Is Born. Frank Borzage went on making movies for another 30 years and won another "Best Director" award for Bad Girl (1932) but never distinguished himself in so prominent a manner again. Lewis Milestone, who won the subsequently orphaned "Best Comedy Director" award, turned around in 1930 to win "Best Director" for All Quiet On The Western Front, a compelling World War I drama (so effective in fact that it converted its star Lew Ayres to the cause of pacifism) adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel. Milestone subsequently distinguished himself in all manner of movies, including the two finest dramas about soldiering during World War II (A Walk In The Sun) and Korea (Pork Chop Hill), respectively, as well as topical comedy with music (Hallelujah, I'm A Bum), drama (Of Mice And Men), and film noir (The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers). Nobody outside of a film society or museum has screened Two Arabian Nights or for that matter Seventh Heaven and Bad Girl in decades, nor has anyone been begging to see video releases of Street Angel or The Way of All Flesh, and the videocassette release of The Last Command hardly added a blip to Paramount Pictures' sales figures during the 1980s.

I bring all of this up partly to illustrate the fleeting nature of fame and honors of any kind in the movie business, but also to illustrate the way in which the Academy Awards have changed. What started out as an industry attempt to recognize excellence in its own ranks very quickly took on far more significant commercial characteristics. By 1936, two new acting categories, "Best Supporting Actor" and "Best Supporting Actress" were added, as the powers-that-were recognized that winning an Academy Award meant major increases in box-office drawing power for the recipients and that there was a lot of public good will to go around. On the technical side, the awards for cinematography were later divided up to recognize black-and-white and color photography as separate categories and then merged again once black-and-white became less prominent. Music awards were divided up between original scores -- which mostly meant instrumental music -- and original songs.

Hollywood has always been better at self-promotion than almost anything else (including making movies it sometimes seems), and the awards proved one of the movie industry's most successful inventions. The Awards were nicknamed "Oscars," so the story goes, when in 1931 an Academy secretary, seeing the Academy Award statuette, remarked "Why, he looks like my uncle Oscar," -- a comment that was reported and repeated in the press, and the name simply stuck and was later duly trademarked by the Academy. The Academy Awards quickly became the most famous and sought after of degrees of film recognition. Partly this was a result of the fame and the potential financial rewards that could accrue to its recipients, especially among the performers, but it also reflected the sheer dominance that Hollywood achieved over the world's filmmaking by the mid-1930s. With a huge film-going population, American audiences were among the most lucrative in the world, and the treatment accorded film stars in those years was akin to that given royalty anywhere else -- and perhaps even better than royalty sometimes got in Europe during the ever-more-regicidal 1930s. There was simply no comparable honor anywhere in the world, attached to a comparable marketplace.

If a movie or a performer could make it in America, they became world renowned, and the success of such figures as Greta Garbo (nominated four times but never a winner), and the treatment accorded Marlene Dietrich (never even nominated) and even failed Dietrich/Garbo pretenders such as Anna Sten, made Hollywood and its system of honors a mecca for performers and producers from all over the world. Most outsiders, of course, didn't make it, or did so only fleetingly, or in very specialized ways. Hungarian-born producer Alexander Korda, who had failed in his attempt to establish himself in Hollywood at the end of the 1920s, returned triumphantly in 1933 with his historical drama The Private Life of Henry VIII, which earned a "Best Picture" nomination and a "Best Actor" Award for Charles Laughton in the title role. It also made a great deal of money in America -- and while Korda was hard-put to repeat any of that success, Henry VIII and its honors and earnings gave him a permanent foot in the door to the American market that made it easier for him to distribute all of his subsequent films and, just as significantly as his credit ran out in England at the end of the 1930s, to borrow money in America for their production. Many years later, the special Oscar awarded to Maurice Chevalier for his work in Gigi enabled the actor/entertainer, who had not been getting many offers for work, to start an entire second career in Hollywood and endear himself to a whole new generation of fans -- in fact, most viewers today probably only know Chevalier for his late 1950s/early 1960s movies, rather than his work from the 1930s when he was in his prime. The Academy, of course, was something of a closed society with a major preference for films that its members -- most of whom were attached to one of the major studios and, in those years, often voted the way their managements wished them to -- knew and understood best. There was something rather self-congratulatory about the awards even in those years, and competition was limited to English-language movies.

In 1932 the first of the major film festivals came into being in Italy, as part of the Venice Bienale. The Italian film industry had been one of the most advanced and renowned in the world early in the twentieth century, before America came to dominate the medium, and by the 1930s Italy was no longer a major cinematic producer -- but the Venice Bienale was a major tourist event, in one of the most popular and celebrated cities in Europe, and the notion of holding a film festival as part of the festivities was a stroke of genius. The {~Venice International Film Festival, which became an annual event after 1934, couldn't compete with the Academy Awards on a commercial level, but it could do something that Hollywood had overlooked -- as an artistic showcase, it was a forum for international cinema, and filmmakers from all over the world (including the United States) were only too happy to embrace Venice as a major event. Where the Oscars celebrated and confirmed American cinema's successes, the Venice festival -- whose awards were the Golden Lion and Silver Lion -- was a competitive forum in which new films and approaches to filmmaking could be discovered and ideas exchanged in an atmosphere more serious than that found in Hollywood.

Not to be outdone, the French, who still had a vibrant film industry of their own in the 1930s and tourist centers that could rival Venice, made plans for a film festival in Cannes, a Riviera resort favored by the wealthy and those who like to be near them. The {~Cannes International Film Festival -- whose awards were the Golden Palm and Silver Palm -- was planned for the fall of 1939, but the worsening political turmoil in Europe forced a delay in its debut until 1946. The outbreak of World War II also forced major changes on the {~Venice Film Festival, and there were accusations of voting by the jury based on politics and ideology during the early 1940s, and with the deterioration and collapse of Mussolini's government, the festival was cancelled during 1943, 1944, and 1945.

The end of the war saw the birth of the {~Cannes International Film Festival, which quickly became familiar to Americans, if not for the movies honored there, then for the antics of the (usually) scantily clad actresses on its Riviera beaches, all part of an ambience that seemed tailor-made for press photographers and gossip columnists. As a result, by the mid-1950s the ordinary American probably knew -- at least vaguely -- the {~Cannes Film Festival better than any other forum except the Academy Awards. Venice and Cannes competed amid an increasingly vibrant European film industry, though the two festivals are decidedly different in character -- Venice did become known for its lavish parties (originally instituted by the British contingent in the late 1930s) but was more of an artistic forum, whereas Cannes is as much a showcase for distributors (especially from America) looking to buy films and producers eager to sell them, as it is about awards, honors, and critical reaction -- that and frolicking (or watching starlets frolic) on the Riviera. As a reaction to the increasing film activity in Europe and the rivalry that now existed from these two other forums the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences instituted a new Foreign Language Oscar category in 1947, which was modified in the 1950s as a regular category called "Best Foreign Film."

What makes the Venice and Cannes festivals especially important to American cinema and its history is that its voting is done not according to industry loyalties (though national loyalties do play a role at both European festivals), but on more purely artistic grounds. This has led to some surprising honors accorded to American movies that, in the Academy voting of the same period, wouldn't even have been nominated. The most striking example is Robert Wise's dazzling 1949 boxing drama The Set-Up, starring Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer who refuses to throw what turns out to be the last fight of his career. Running 72 minutes and taking place in real-time, The Set-Up was a "B"-picture (that is, a second-feature intended to be paired with either a bigger-budget movie or another of equal stature) made at RKO (a studio rapidly sinking by the bow even in those days) by a director who was on his way out of the studio during a management shake-up and virtually disowned by a management that didn't care about it. The Set-Up was never even nominated for an Academy Award, but it was voted the "Critics Award" as "Best Picture" at the {~Cannes Film Festival and nominated as "Best Picture" by the British Film Academy.

In more recent years, the European festival juries and the critics invited to those festivals have reached out to other American movies that -- seemingly -- fall well beyond the range of the Academy in Hollywood: Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) is the most recent and well-known such overseas success story, but others have included the {~Venice Film Festival's awarding of the Silver Lion award to Shirley Knight for her extraordinary performance as a predatory female stalking young black men on New York's subways in Anthony Harvey's 1966 film Dutchman, based on a short play by LeRoi Jones; and the Golden Lion awarded in 1993 to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, just the sort of non-feel-good movie that American awards and audiences tend to overlook.

The European political situation led directly to the founding of the next major festival on the continent, the {~Berlin International Film Festival. The city of Berlin had been divided into Western and Eastern sections by the western European allies and the Soviet Union after World War II, and West Berlin was surrounded by a hostile East Germany. Partly as a means of making West Berliners feel they were still part of the European creative community, the {~Berlin International Film Festival was founded in 1951 with the strong support of all of the Western European nations. By the end of the decade, the Berlin festival -- whose major prizes are the Golden Bear and Silver Bear -- was a serious rival to Cannes and Venice, with a particularly political character to its content; the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations, disputing the legitimacy of the event, did not participate, although the satellite nations sent observers until the building of the Berlin Wall a decade after the founding of the festival. At the end of the 1980s as the Soviet policy of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev took hold, entries from the Eastern bloc helped invigorate the festival, and before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and reunification of East and West Germany, the festival managers broke precedent by presenting some of its screenings at three theaters in East Berlin.

These European festivals tend to be more concerned with film and less with marketing, at least in their awards -- although Cannes is very much a marketing and selling event -- than the Oscars, but they are also very politically conscious. Because of their connections to their parent governments, politics and funding have intruded on the proceedings; the {~Cannes Film Festival was not held during 1948 and 1950 precisely because of internal political conflicts and a shortage of funds, and the {~Venice Film Festival was cancelled during 1973 and 1974. Even more telling has been the political persuasion of the participants -- European filmmakers tend to be more politically driven than their American counterparts, and in 1968 the {~Cannes Film Festival was suspended amid political demonstrations supported by Francois Truffaut, among other film directors. Similarly, the {~Berlin Film Festival in 1986 awarded the Golden Bear to Stammhein, a movie about the trial of members of the political terrorist Baader-Meinhof group, after the German government objected to the showing of the movie at the festival. The following year, the festival organizers offered the government official who had objected to Stammhein a seat on the selection committee. More recently, German director Helma Sander-Brahms quit the {~Berlin Film Festival selection committee in protest over the excessive prominence of American movies at the festival.

At the same time, the European film festivals do find films -- including American movies -- that might otherwise be lost in the American marketing machine. Steven Soderbegh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which took the Golden Palm at the {~Cannes Film Festival, is the best-known example. But mainstream movies have also won, including Oliver Stone's Platoon, a suitably left-leaning movie which took the Silver Bear Award at Berlin in 1987, and Rain Man won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1989.

The British began giving out their own awards, called "Stellas," in 1946 under the auspices of the British Film Academy, which was founded that same year for the advancement of film. Reasonably close in character to the American Academy Awards, the Stellas had a mainstream thrust and, rather predictably, were peculiarly British in nature, although American movies were allowed to compete. In 1950, one of the "Best Picture" nominees was Robert Wise's The Set-Up, a compelling film that was treated as an obscure boxing drama in its own country but much honored in Europe. In 1959, the BFA merged with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors, and became the Society of Film and Television Arts. Made up of the senior creative workers in British film and television, the society has been effective in promoting the advancement of British films, although it is less creative and daring in its thrust -- and consequently less interesting -- than the British Film Institute, which has made far more significant contributions in the areas of restoration and presentation of deserving subjects, most recently (and notably) the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Amid all of this overseas activity, the Oscars also had rivals and competitors in their own backyard in the guise of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Founded in 1943 as the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association, made up of reporters, reviewers, and photographers who cover film for foreign publications, the organization began giving its own awards for excellence in 1944, which became known as the {~Golden Globes -- the first winner of the "Best Picture" award was Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943), which was a triple Oscar winner (for "Best Actress," "Best Cinematography," and "Best Original Score") and a nominee for "Best Picture" and "Best Director," among a half dozen other Academy Awards. The {~Golden Globes were not nearly as well known as the Oscars, lacking the range of the latter's major media exposure, and a split in the parent organization, from 1950 thru 1955, probably didn't help. But since being reconstituted as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1955, the {~Golden Globes have achieved growing prominence. During the 1970s, with the growth of a popular and tabloid gossip press eager for material to cover, the awards began getting ever greater coverage, nominated and presented weeks ahead of the Oscars (and television's Emmys -- {~Golden Globes include television awards as well).

The parent organization probably wasn't fully prepared for this sudden growth in prominence, fueled both by the press and film companies, producers, and publicists eager to capitalize on any legitimate boost in their fortunes. The awards were always suspect due to the small and relatively obscure membership of the Association -- some 70 to 80 members, affiliated primarily with overseas press organizations scarcely known in the United States. After Pia Zadora, a young actress/singer, won a Golden Globe as "Best New Performer" (a category seemingly designed as a give away) in 1981 based on her work in a movie called Butterfly, accusations surfaced that the balloting was influenced by outsiders (in this case, allegedly Zadora's wealthy husband, who, it was claimed, had flown numerous members of the Association for a few days' revelry in Las Vegas). The organization's membership qualifications were called into question -- too many of its voting members, it was claimed, worked hardly at all as film writers and were really what their "day jobs" constituted, i.e. chauffeurs, waiters etc., perhaps filing an occasional story with some overseas newspaper in Europe, Asia, South America, or the Middle East. Some anonymous Academy members referred to Association members rather offensively as "illegal aliens," and even recipients of the awards were heard to scoff at their significance. Some of this resentment was a product of pure snobbishness on the part of the American press, especially film reporters who had their own turf to worry about, and was also fueled by Academy members uneasy with the growing prominence of the Golden Globes, but the Zadora award brought matters to a head. The result was that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association tightened its membership requirements and also tightened up on the nature of the awards. Special categories, seemingly designed to give awards to a specific performer, were eliminated, and these and other major reforms re-established the Golden Globes in the 1990s as a key competitor to the Oscars.

A contract with Turner Entertainment to televise the presentations, which had previously been shown only in syndication, gave the Golden Globes near-network status as an event, and as it turned out, the Hollywood community -- who, after all, in an earlier inclination had created the Oscars -- rather liked the awards and the ceremonies. Not only were more movies and performers eligible than in the Oscar balloting, but there were occasional honors that satisfied the community on a personal level, such as the award given to veteran actress Susan Flannery (Days of Our Lives) for her appearance in the disaster movie The Towering Inferno (1974); Flannery had toiled for years in the acting trenches of daytime television, and even Fred Astaire had gotten an Oscar nomination for his work in the same movie.

The Golden Globes have some advantages over the Oscars in their structure, most notably the separate categories for drama and comedy, so that performers and directors are "competing" in more relevant configurations. This affords the Golden Globes more flexibility and allows them a broader range of nominees and winners. Indeed, the Golden Globes have, for much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, become recognized as a good predictor of the direction in the which the Oscars go -- perhaps the best example in recent years was Martin Landau's award as "Best Supporting Actor." The Golden Globes gave Landau its award, and the Academy followed suit with an Oscar to the actor; his work in Tim Burton's Ed Wood was superb, and as a past nominee without winning, Landau was probably a sort of sentimental favorite with a viable career still on-going, but he might well have been overlooked in other circumstances based on his having spent so much of his career on television as opposed to feature films.

Other awards in America that carry tremendous weight include the New York Film Critics, who give out their honors in December of each year (in time to influence the Oscar nominations) and the {~Sundance Film Festival. The New York critics award is the most prestigious critics honor in the country, and to some extent this turf is a jealously guarded one; in 1985, the Los Angeles Film Critics voted an award to Terry Gilliam's futuristic drama/satire Brazil, a film that hadn't opened officially in the United States because the head of the studio that financed it (MCA/Universal) objected to its content and felt it was a sure money-loser; the award started a chain of events that led to the movie's release, after much embarrassment to the studio, but in the wake of the Los Angeles award, the New York Film critics took exception to its being granted, and questions (some coming out of New York) began arising about how serious the Los Angeles organization was, since most of its members didn't work "full-time" as critics (most were teachers and academics).

The {~Sundance Film Festival (known until 1989 as the United States Film and Video Festival) was founded in 1980 along with the Sundance Institute, an organization formed by Robert Redford to foster independent filmmaking in the United States. In the 15 years since then, it has become one of the most influential film festivals in the world -- Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape came out of the {~Sundance Festival to win international acclaim, and other winners include such diverse figures as Joel and Ethan Coen with Blood Simple (1984) and Al Reinart with For All Mankind (1989), a brilliant documentary about the Apollo astronauts. Held in January of each year in Park City, Utah, the {~Sundance Festival is the major outlet for American independent cinema, and has had a profound effect on mainstream movies over the previous decade-and-a-half; the awards carry weight, but the festival itself is also an important showcase for the entrants, in which their films are seen by representatives of virtually every major studio and distribution company in the United States.

The importance of film awards has grown exponentially with the growth of home video, as distributors seek to capitalize on any conceivable marketing edge, as well as guidance for what to release. The Oscars have the greatest prominence and translate most easily into video results -- a major Academy Award ("Best Picture," "Best Actress," "Best Actor," "Best Director") can yield up to an extra $10-$15 million at the box office or for the video release; minor awards virtually ensure a video release of some kind to even the most obscure movies. And major foreign-film awards, especially for English-language movies and those whose subjects and content seem suited to American tastes, ensure at least consideration for American theatrical and home-video release.