At the
1st Academy Awards ceremony (
1928), there was no Best Picture award. Instead, there were two separate awards, one called Most Outstanding Production, won by the epic
Wings, and one called
Most Artistic Quality of Production, won by the art film
Sunrise. The awards were intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior filmmaking, and in fact the judges and the studio bosses who sought to influence their decisions paid more attention to the latter -
MGM head
Louis B. Mayer, who had disliked the realism of
King Vidor's
The Crowd, pressured the judges not to honor his own studio's film, and to select
Sunrise instead. The next year, the Academy instituted a single award called Best Production, and decided retroactively that the award won by
Wings had been the equivalent of that award, with the result that
Wings is often listed as the winner of a sole Best Picture award for the first year. The title of the award was eventually changed to Best Picture for the 1931 awards.
From 1944 to 2008, the Academy restricted nominations to five Best Picture nominees per year. As of the
82nd Academy Awards ceremony (for
2009), there have been 474 films nominated for the Best Picture award. Throughout the past 82 years, AMPAS has presented a total of 82 Best Picture awards. Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Picture and
Best Director have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 82 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 60 have also been awarded Best Director.
[1] Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s):
Wings (1928),
Grand Hotel (1932), and
Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years:
Lewis Milestone (1928) and
Frank Lloyd (1929).
However, in 2009, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that the number of Best Picture nominees would be increased from five to ten. The expansion was a throwback to the Academy's early years in the 1930s and '40s, when anywhere between eight and 12 films were shortlisted (or longlisted). "Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize," AMPAS President Sid Ganis said in a press conference. "I can't wait to see what that list of 10 looks like when the nominees are announced in February."
[1]
