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The 1st Academy Awards ceremony took place 95 years ago, on May 16, 1929. There were only 12 categories at the inaugural Oscars, three of which were permanently discontinued the following year. Wings was the very first movie to win Best Picture, then called Outstanding Picture, at the Oscars.

12 lucky individuals and movies won the very first Oscars 95 years ago at the 1st Academy Awards. The 2024 Oscars on Sunday, March 10, 2024, are just around the corner. With a stacked lineup of 2024 Oscar nominees across all categories, the 96th Academy Awards are sure to be an exciting night. The award show may be a grand spectacle now, but the very first Oscars, which took place on May 16, 1929, before the ceremony and the awards themselves were ever colloquially known as "Oscars," was a much more lowkey affair.

The 1st Academy Awards ceremony, which honored films released between August 1, 1927, and July 31, 1928, was hosted by Academy President Douglas Fairbanks...

Wings, Dr. Strangelove: Film preservation and ‘Amazing Tales from the Archives’ (photo: Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Clara Bow, Richard Arlen in William A. Wellman’s Wings) The 2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s edition of "Amazing Tales from the Archives" was perhaps the weakest of the series to date. In the past, they have done a wonderful job demonstrating the excitement of finding lost films and footage, assembling them together, preserving and restoring them. This installment revolved around the "Digital Age," and did not concentrate only on silent film. The reconstruction of William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927), the first Best Picture (or "Best Production") Academy Award winner, was a familiar story of how an old film print could be dusted off and used for the production of a Digital Cinema Package. By now, we all are aware of the importance of film preservation, which is part detective work and part modern technology.

Chicago – By today’s standards, “Wings” would be more expensive than any movie ever made. That’s what an undertaking this legendary film was for Paramount in the ’20s. The biggest studio in the world set out to make the biggest film in history, presenting viewers with things they had never seen before and pushing the boundaries of what was capable on celluloid. Sadly, “Wings” has somewhat become an answer to a trivia question and the remarkable quality of the film itself has been underappreciated by time. This glorious Blu-ray restoration should help fix that oversight.

Blu-ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

As the Blu-ray version of the film opens, the Paramount logo cycles back through its different iterations, arriving at what it was in 1927 when “Wings” was released. It’s a brilliant overture, taking us back in time. A sepia-tinged plane flies overhead and the gloriously-reconstructed score, which was rerecorded by a modern...