The nominees have been named, Hollywood is abuzz. The 78th Academy Awards Ceremony will be broadcast on March 5, 2006, from Hollywood's Kodak Theater.

The first Academy Awards of Merit were presented in 1929, at a banquet held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Two hundred and seventy guests paid $5 each to attend the event. Fifteen awards were given out that night; Wings won the award for best picture. Emil Jannings won the Best Actor award for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. Janet Gaynor was the only woman to receive an award that year, for Best Actress. She won for the cumulative work she had done in the previous year in Seventh Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel.

In the early years, names of winners were published in the newspaper on the night of the ceremony. In 1940, when a Los Angeles paper published the names before the awards were even handed out, the system was changed. Starting the next year, awards were kept secret in sealed envelopes. The first telecast of the ceremony was made by NBC in 1953, with Bob Hope emceeing from Hollywood and Fredric March making presentations in New York.

Oscar nominees are selected and voted for by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Aside from the industry awards, three special awards are given: the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for excellence in producing, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for technological contributions.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Academy Awards".
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