Brian Laird on WNYC, and now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

Today, thing number 73, 100 years of the Best Picture Award at the Oscars. We're

almost at that centennial. This Sunday's broadcast will mark the 97th year of the Academy Awards,

coming at a time when movie studios are stuck between the peril of going straight to streaming,

and on the other hand, massive studios like Marvel.

So what is the history of the awards? And are they still relevant? Best Picture in particular,

though, we'll touch on a few other things as we go, joining us now to walk and really run.

We're going to kind of speed read our way through 100 years of the best picture winners, through the

decades of the Oscars, is Michael Shulman, New Yorker staff writer and the author of

Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.

Hey, Michael, thanks for coming on today.

Thanks for having me.

And just to establish the basics, before we get into a lot of

titles and a few actors, your book begins in 1927 with the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences. So for people who have never really thought it through, what is the Academy in

the first place? And who gets to decide on these awards?

The Academy is a group of around 11,000 professional filmmakers from all different branches.

They have the actors branch, the directors, you know, technicians of different kinds, documentary makers,

all sorts of different aspects of filmmaking. And they all vote on for their individual branch

for the nominations and then plus Beck's picture. And then everyone gets to vote on the final

winners.

And you write about how there were two underlying reasons for why it really came to be,

...