Anne Bancroft

A new history of the organization behind the Academy Awards pulls back the curtain on Oscar's early years.

The backstory, however, has been unknown or misinterpreted at times, in part because the academy has guarded the minutes of its directors' meetings and other records. Amid sex scandals and censorship efforts in the 1920s, the film community sought a way to emphasize the art of the motion picture. (Turning its annual awards ceremony into a television show in the 1950s, not an obvious solution at the time, eventually took care of the money problem.)