After months and months of anticipation, prognostication, and other speculative analysis, the Academy Awards are very nearly upon us. On Sunday night, we’ll all finally lay the Leo-wants-an-Oscar memes to rest, pretend not to cry during Sylvester Stallone’s inevitable acceptance speech, and begin the long, therapeutic process of forgetting that The Revenant is a movie that exists. But before any of this can get going, however, the ceremony will begin with, what else, its opening title card. It only lasts for a few seconds and then gets immediately lost in the mad shuffle of awards excitement, but the overall design of the Oscar program itself can be revealing when closely inspected.
World Wide Interweb has done us all the service of slapping together the video embedded above, a supercut of the last thirty years’ worth of Oscar opening titles. That might not seem like the most interesting thing in the world, but seeing the makeup of the Oscar look shift and mutate year-by-year actually exposes some unexpected insights. For one, the effect of watching the resolution from these clips sharpen as technology becomes more sophisticated is a brutal awareness of the passage of time. But the introductions paint a portrait of an awards show in flux, constantly adapting to changing tastes and updating itself. Eventually the show’s producers would ditch the computer-generated graphic of Art Deco-lite opulence that was supposed to set the tone of opulence, and go with the boilerplate announcement voiceover. But later down the line, within the past six or seven years, the program has moved away from announcing the awards and now instead announces the host. One could surmise that this reflects a heightened awareness of the entertainment component of the show itself, that this is not a delivery method for awards but a show with a beloved star headlining. It’s only a few minutes, and provides a little perspective on the Oscars — give it a look.
