[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This Sunday marks the 96th Annual Academy Awards, also known as Hollywood's biggest night. When did the Oscars become such a defining cultural touchstone, an award coveted by all of Hollywood's brightest stars? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927. Since then, the Oscars have both upheld the status quo and brought attention and accolades to new and experimental art. They've rewarded new and emerging talent and cemented superstars.

The Oscars have also been a focus of activism with Oscars So White and the Time's Up and Me Too Movements highlighting the lack of diversity in Academy Award nominees and the dramatic pay gap between male and female actors. At their best, the Oscars can be a reflection of what's most exciting about contemporary cinema, but how often throughout history have the awards lived up to those ideals? Joining us for the next hour for a deep dive into the history of the Academy Awards is author and New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman. He's the author of the book, Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, which is out now in paperback. Michael, welcome to All Of It.

Michael Schulman: Oh, thanks for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. To begin this conversation, I want to ask, why do the Oscars matter? Why is an award show worth writing a whole book about and dedicating an hour of radio too? What makes the Oscars special?

Michael Schulman: Let me start with a disclaimer. They don't matter. It's fine if you think they're ridiculous. I think they're ridiculous and absurd and that's part of the fun of the Oscars. I think the Oscars are fun. It's okay not to read too much into them. What I found though is that the Oscars are a very imperfect measuring tool for cinematic worth. The first line in the book is about how they're always getting it wrong.

If you see the Oscars as a kind of mirror of how Hollywood evolves and how Hollywood sees itself or wants to see itself, they're very revealing. I also think that the Oscars give us a platform to talk about movies. Movies aren't supposed to be ranked. Art is not supposed to be ranked like sports teams. That's the kind of fallacy at the heart of the Academy Awards.

There is no such thing as Best Actress or Best Picture. It's all subjective, but I do think that these many months of Oscar season give us all a chance to discuss movies and talk about what we liked and what we didn't like and what we think should get the award and what got snubbed and whatever. That is useful because art should not be ranked, but it should be discussed.

Kousha Navidar: You discuss it to great insight in this book. When did you first start getting interested in the Oscars?

Michael Schulman: Oh, I remember the first time I watched the Oscars exactly. I was 11, I believe. This was 1993. My parents let me stay up and watch the Oscars. I remember exactly. This was the era of the Billy Crystal medleys. He would open the show with a song-and-dance routine about all the nominated films. I was too young to have seen these films like The Crying Game and Unforgiven, but I loved Billy Crystal, probably from City Slickers and stuff like that. I just thought this was the funniest thing I've ever seen. I loved the idea that there was this place called Hollywood, where all of these people I had seen in movies came together. That was a new concept for me.

Kousha Navidar: My first memory of the Oscars was also Billy Crystal singing on stage, so kindred spirit right there. There's a long history to it as well. When was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded and whose idea was it to found an awards show?

Michael Schulman: The academy itself was founded in 1927. The reason had nothing to do with awards. Awards were an afterthought. They were one thing on a long list of ideas that the academy had. The academy was founded by Louis B. Mayer, who was the head of MGM. Very powerful man. There were 36 founding members who were a cross-section of important people in silent-era Hollywood. They envisioned it as a League of Nations for the industry.

They want us to bring people together and create harmony and solve problems and promote the art of motion pictures throughout the world. Some of the subtext of that was that they also wanted to forestall unionization. They thought if we can come together and solve problems and create harmony, that means that the actors won't unionize and demand things. That was certainly part of Louis B. Mayer's motivation. They also wanted to put a better face on Hollywood because there was a terrible public relations.

There was an image problem because of all these salacious scandals from the 1920s like the trial of Fatty Arbuckle and the murder of William Desmond Taylor, all these old Tinseltown scandals that gave a lot of the country the impression that Hollywood was a cesspool of sin. They rebranded, which is something Hollywood is very good at doing, from a cesspool to an academy, which is very lofty-sounding. The awards started two years in, in 1929 at their second-anniversary dinner. They grew out of that goal to loftify the movies.

Kousha Navidar: What were a couple of the original categories in that first iteration?

Michael Schulman: Interestingly, the first Academy Awards in '29 had two top prizes. There was outstanding production, which it went to this big World War I spectacular called Wings. Then there was a unique or artistic production, which went to a smaller movie called Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. That is really interesting to me because I feel like ever since, there's been this pull between art and commerce in the awards. There was also that first year and only that first year, an award for Best Title Writing, meaning the intertitles in silent movies.

Now, by the time they got to the first awards, talkies had come along and had completely made silent movies all bit of obsolete at that point. They actually gave a special award to the jazz singer, which was, of course, the first big talky hit, because they didn't even think it belonged in the other categories with the silent movies they were honoring. This one guy, Joseph Farnham, won the first and only award ever for Best Title Writing.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Michael Schulman about his book, Oscar Wars. We've gone through the founding of it. I want to skip to the 1940s, which is an era that you start off with or you talked about in your book. History was made in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actor or actress to take home an Oscar. She won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone with the Wind. Let's hear a bit of her acceptance speech.

Hattie McDaniel: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, fellow members of the motion picture industry, and honored guests. This is one of the happiest moments of my life. I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of the awards. For your kindness, it has made me feel very, very humble. I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be accredited to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel. May I say thank you and God bless.

[applause]

Kousha Navidar: Sidney Poitier became the first Black man to win Best Actor in 1964. Let's hear a bit of that speech as well.

Sidney Poitier: It is a long journey to this moment. I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people. Principally, among whom are Ralph Nelson, James Poe, William Barrett, Martin Baum, and, of course, the members of the academy. For all of them, all I can say is a very special thank you.

[applause]

Kousha Navidar: Michael, how were these wins by Hattie and Sidney received in Hollywood and how did the academy's relationship with actors of color change from 1940 to '64, if at all?

Michael Schulman: Well, the first thing to point out is that 1940 and 1964 are 24 years apart. These pioneering victories happened very sporadically throughout the first, say, 80 years of the academy's history. They tended to happen at moments when the academy wanted to project some kind of progressive image. 1940 was in the middle of World War II. That speech by Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind was used to show how America, unlike Nazi Germany, was so tolerant and open-minded.

Then 1964, of course, was in the heat of the civil rights movement. It was just a few months after the March on Washington. A lot of movie stars, including Sidney Poitier, had gone to the March on Washington to represent Hollywood. It was a moment when Hollywood wanted to embrace the cause of civil rights. On the other hand, these are very inspiring moments and inspiring speeches. It's so emotional even to hear them and hear the emotion in those voices.

If you look closer at how these winners experience these very isolated victories, they're very fraught for the winners because they're out there having to carry this burden of representing an entire race. They're alone. Each of these first had a lot of backlash and career stumbling after their award. Hattie McDaniel, of course, played Mammy in Gone with the Wind. After she won this award, she was typecast as more Mammy types.

The NAACP actually strongly objected to the kind of stereotypes that her whole career had represented. Similarly, Sidney Poitier was known for playing these very upstanding "acceptable" figures like doctors and whoever. He got a lot of pushback too, even from within the Black community for appealing too much to white audiences and not having enough anger or sexuality in his public persona. These weren't always such joyous occasions for that winner.

Kousha Navidar: Do you feel like you can see echoes of that or I guess hear echoes of that today with that idea of it being fraught when there is a milestone that's reached of some kind?

Michael Schulman: Of course. I think the same thing happened to Halle Berry when she was the first Black actress to win in 2002. Again, this is a very long time after the dates we just talked about. She faced a lot of backlash after she won for Monster's Ball. I still feel like this year, we have the first Native American woman in the Best Actress category, Lily Gladstone, for Killers of the Flower Moon. She's very on message and she's a very inspiring and very thoughtful figure. Of course, she's out there having to teach people about Native American issues when Emma Stone certainly doesn't have to do that as part of her campaign.

Kousha Navidar: That word "fraught" really sticks out to me. If we skip back in time after the 21st century, we go back to the '50s, we can talk about the blacklist. In the early years of the Cold War, the Red Scare swept the country. Many Hollywood actors, writers, directors ended up on the blacklist. There were suspected communists who weren't able to work with the studios. Michael, what was the academy's role during this period?

Michael Schulman: The academy is typically a pretty lowercase c conservative institution. It doesn't like to ruffle a lot of feathers and it pretty much towed the line of the blacklist. For about two years, the academy actually had a rule that if you were blacklisted, meaning if you had suspected communist ties or had defied a congressional committee by not naming names, you couldn't be nominated for an Academy Award.

Actually, the first year they put in this rule, 1957, I believe, when a writer named Michael Wilson, who had been blacklisted, he had written a movie called Friendly Persuasion about Quakers. Because he was on the blacklist, they couldn't put his name in the credits. There was no screenwriter in the credits. It was like, "Based on the book by da-da-da-da, written by no one," because he had obviously written it.

That screenplay got nominated for an Academy Award, but there was no identifiable screenwriter, except Michael Wilson. The day it was nominated, it was disqualified. That same year, something absolutely crazy happened, which is that the winner of a category called Best Motion Picture Story went to someone named Robert Rich for a movie called The Brave One, about a little boy in Mexico and his pet bull. Robert Rich did not show up to receive this award. Robert Rich could not be located. Robert Rich didn't exist.

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Michael Schulman: It was a front for the blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, who had been exiled to Mexico. He was watching from home and was absolutely tickled by the idea that this fake person that he had created to take the credit for the movie had won an Academy Award. It became, as Life magazine called it, a "Who won it?" Nobody could figure out for two years that it was him.

Kousha Navidar: When they finally figured out, what happened?

Michael Schulman: Dalton Trumbo was very cunning. He knew that this gave him a little bit of leverage because he knew that there were so many blacklisted writers writing on the black market under fake names. Now that he had won an award, he was like, "I can play the press. I can embarrass the academy because it's an open secret that all of these blacklisted screenwriters are, in fact, working. Now, they're winning awards." He made it into a little bit of a game and he pushed the academy to rescind its rule against blacklisted nominees. The minute they dropped the rule, he went out in public and said, "Yes, I am Robert Rich."

Kousha Navidar: Wow. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Michael Schulman about his book Oscar Wars. We're going decade by decade. In about two or three minutes, I want to touch quickly on the '60s and '70s. We're here for the full hour with Michael. Before we go to break, I want to talk about this decade because it is a very interesting decade. Hollywood was a bit slow to react to the counterculture movements of the '60s, but you mark the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy as a turning point in cinematic history. What made this film stand out from the other types of films usually recognized by the academy?

Michael Schulman: Well, let me put it this way. At the beginning of 1969, the Best Picture winner was Oliver, which was rated G. The rating system was new, but it's still the first and only G-rated Best Picture winner. By the next year, 1970, Midnight Cowboy won. It was the first and only Best Picture winner rated X. How do you get from G to X in a year? That was a question I wanted to answer.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Wow. How do you think it happened? What do you think was the shift there that made it possible?

Michael Schulman: Think about what was happening in the world in 1969. Specifically, in Hollywood, it was the Manson murders. The counterculture had erupted. As much as the academy was interested in this new wave of filmmaking, movies like The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bonnie and Clyde, they were getting nominated, but they weren't really winning awards. Midnight Cowboy was the first real counterculture movie to dominate and win.

The president of the academy at the time was Gregory Peck, who, of course, we remember as Atticus Finch. He was a liberal patriarch of Hollywood. He was very forward-thinking and realized that the academy had to keep up with the times, or else it was going to be obsolete. He actually brought in a lot of new members who were these young, hip people making these kinds of movies like Dennis Hopper, who made Easy Rider, and then actually demoted a bunch of older members who hadn't worked in movies since the '30s. It caused so much outrage.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Before we go to break, in about 30 seconds, if you had to pick a favorite Best Picture winner from the decades we've been talking about, from the founding all the way up to the late '60s, what's that movie to you?

Michael Schulman: I love Midnight Cowboy. Gosh. Actually, you know what? All About Eve, 1951. I love All About Eve.

Kousha Navidar: What made it stand out to you right now?

Michael Schulman: It's just one of my favorite movies. It's so incredibly acid and funny and has so many incredible performances, especially Betty Davis, who, by the way, I have a chapter about that whole Best Actress category because she lost. She was nominated up against Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard, who also lost. They both lost to Judy Holliday from Born Yesterday. All performances that are absolutely iconic.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Well, coming up next, we'll talk about the incredible Best Picture lineup of 1976, the birth of the Oscars campaign, the influence of Harvey Weinstein, Oscars So White, and more.

[music]

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. We continue a deep dive into the history of the Academy Awards with Michael Schulman, author of the book, Oscar Wars" A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. We already spoke about the early days of the academy through the '60s. Now, let's turn to one of the best decades of film many say, the 1970s. We'll start with 1976. 1976 is one of the most celebrated Best Picture lineups ever, Michael, right?

Michael Schulman: Oh, it's absolutely stacked.

Kousha Navidar: Can you tell us some of the nominated films from that year?

Michael Schulman: The nominees are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Barry Lyndon, and Jaws.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. What do you think it was about that particular year? Where did that lineup come from?

Michael Schulman: This is the heat of the New Hollywood, which was the big movement in cinema in American movies in the '70s. What's interesting to me is the first four are these auteurist, anti-establishment masterpieces. The last one, Jaws, is the first summer blockbuster by this kid named Spielberg. That year, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won all of the major awards. It's one of three movies that won the big five.

Jaws, which was the only one that didn't get a director nomination for Spielberg, he was snubbed. Jaws pointed the way to the future. It pointed the way to the blockbuster '80s to come. It was the movie that taught Hollywood how to make big money again by tons of marketing, tons of tie-ins and promotion, and then opening a huge movie in the summertime. That led to Star Wars and ET and a very different kind of movie that pretty much killed off the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest kind of movie.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, interesting. Do you think that it had any other impacts, or I guess the right way of asking this is, what was it about Jaws that set the course for the future in your words?

Michael Schulman: It came down to just how it was marketed. The fact that it was this huge, huge buildup and then it opened on a ton of screens, that was not how movie releasing was usually done. The opening of Jaws is like a thing that's probably studied in business schools because it was a different model of hyping up a movie and then opening it wide. It was a pop cultural sensation. Lifeguard schools couldn't get people to join as lifeguards because they were too scared of the water.

It became the highest-grossing movie up until then when it came out. It was just a pop cultural sensation. What's interesting is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was also a huge hit, but it's a different kind of movie. The reason I chose that one year to dive in real deep on and talk about those five movies is because you can see Hollywood start to shift its business model, its values, and what kind of movies it was making.

Kousha Navidar: I might be way off here and please correct me because this is just out of genuine curiosity. It sounds like that shift is similar to the shift that you see in the mid-2010s where, suddenly, it's these big franchise movies that end up taking the cake.

Michael Schulman: Oh, yes.

Kousha Navidar: I'm just wondering, is there any corollary there? Is it the same logic?

Michael Schulman: No, absolutely. Jaws set the model for this new thing, the big summer blockbuster. Much as Marvel created this new model of not just one blockbuster, but each blockbuster creates the next one and the next one. It's this web of blockbusters that are all in one cinematic universe. That's something that, in both cases, every other studio immediately tried to copy that model to make an easy buck and a lot of bucks.

Kousha Navidar: Right, a lot of bucks.

Michael Schulman: When that happens, Hollywood is constantly this tug of war between art and commerce as are the Oscars. What's interesting about looking through each decade of Oscar history is that you see that push and pull.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting how history repeats itself sometimes. I want to jump to the '80s, but in an unexpected way because we don't spend a ton of time in the '80s in this book or the '80s just a bad period for movies. What's up?

Michael Schulman: Personally, I did want to cover every decade. I'm not crazy about a lot of the movies that won in the '80s. They're sleepy. Gandhi, Out of Africa, The Last Emperor. There wasn't a single race that really pulled my interest that told a larger story. The story I did want to tell in the '80s was actually about a particular ceremony that is very notorious, which is 1989, remembered as the worst Oscars ever.

It's remembered that way because it began with an 11-minute production number that famously or infamously included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary with a woman dressed as Snow White in a replica of the Coconut Grove with dancing cocktail tables. It's like a gay fever dream. It's insane. The man behind it was this guy, Allan Carr, who was this producer. He produced Grease among many other things. He was known for wearing fabulous kaftans. He was this flamboyant figure who threw incredible house parties. He dreamt his whole life of producing the Oscars. When he finally did, he mounted this ceremony that was so tacky and insane and over the top that it destroyed his career.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Wow. Let's hop to the '90s. It really centered on this rivalry between Steven Spielberg with DreamWorks and Harvey Weinstein with Miramax. How did Weinstein create the playbook for Oscars campaigning and what had Oscar campaigning looked like before his influence?

Michael Schulman: There had been Oscar campaigning. There were people placing for your consideration ads and Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, stuff like that. The studios sent out fancy packages to members with fancy coffee tables, books, and stuff like that. What Weinstein did was he treated Oscar campaigning as guerrilla warfare. Those were his words. He saw himself as an underdog because he and his brother, Bob Weinstein, were running this indie movie company, Miramax, from New York City. They weren't Hollywood people. They were releasing these edgy or artsy movies like The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction.

They felt like they needed to win Oscars in order to prop up these movies and get them out of what they called the arthouse ghetto. Over the course of the '90s, they honed this playbook, specifically Harvey Weinstein did, of having his staff members call voters, find pockets of academy voters in obscure places, and set up screenings for them, blanketing everywhere with ads. This is what Harvey Weinstein used to be notorious for before his crimes were exposed, this aggressive mode of campaigning. It reached a climax in 1999 when he unexpectedly won with Shakespeare in Love, which beat the assumed front runner, Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. This is remembered as the ugliest Best Picture fight of all time.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. If you're just joining us, I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Michael Schulman about his book, Oscar Wars. Before the break, we had discussed Halle Berry. I wanted to bring that up because I think this is an interesting moment. Obviously, very interesting moment in Oscar's history too. In 2002, Halle Berry becomes the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Lead Actress for her performance in the film Monster's Ball. Let's listen to a bit of her acceptance speech.

Halle Berry: This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll.

[applause]

Halle Berry: It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

[applause]

Kousha Navidar: Michael, was this moment a turning point for Black women in Hollywood, or as campaigns like Oscars So White have claimed, is race still a fundamental barrier in these categories?

Michael Schulman: I think, notably, this was not a turning point for Black women in the Oscars or in Hollywood. That's what's so heartbreaking about it. Halle Berry, you heard in that speech, said a door tonight has been opened, and yet there hasn't been another Black Best Actress winner since Halle Berry in 2002. There have been other women of color. Michelle Yeoh won last year. Lily Gladstone may well win this year.

In 2016, so that's 14 years after she won this award, Halle Berry gave an interview in the midst of the Oscars So White scandal, where she said, "I thought the door was opening and it turned out it wasn't. I thought it was bigger than me. It turns out maybe it was just me." I think, once again, as with Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier, those earlier winners that we spoke about, it's a very isolating experience to be the face of this change and then realize that it was mostly symbolic. It was mostly a chance for white Hollywood to pat itself on the back. I think that was some of the frustration that fueled the outrage in Oscars So White.

Kousha Navidar: Let's hop a little bit to the present. It struck me that this year, two of the Best Picture nominees are foreign language films. The Zone of Interest, which is in German, and Anatomy of a Fall, which is a French film that is also in English, plus Past Lives is an American film that has a significant amount in Korean. In 2020, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite became the first foreign language film to take home the Oscar for Best Picture. What has the academy's relationship been like with films from other countries throughout its history and why do you think we're seeing a new resurgence of foreign language films right now?

Michael Schulman: The academy has historically been very xenophobic and focused on Hollywood studios in Hollywood. The first couple of decades, it was so much about consolidating the power and influence of the studio system. Even in the '60s and '70s when foreign film was so important, even in America like Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, those people weren't getting Best Picture nominations, but for the most part.

What happened was, actually, it has a lot to do with Oscars So White. In 2016, it was the second year in a row that all of the acting nominees were white. Of course, we remember the outrage. There was the hashtag. There were boycotts. People like Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith boycotted the awards. In response, the academy's board fast-tracked this plan to diversify the membership, the people who vote.

They can't control what people vote for, of course, but they can choose who their members are. They let in a lot more people. It was a lot more people of color, of course, younger people, women, and notably, and this went under the radar at the time, international members from around the world. I think you started seeing that reflected in wins like Parasite in 2018, I believe 2019.

I think that continues now where the academy is so much more international. I think 25% of their members are outside of the US. For those members, every film that's not from their own country is an international film. There's less of a bias toward Hollywood movies. A movie like Anatomy of a Fall, if you're a voter who lives in, I don't know, Italy, that doesn't seem much more foreign to you than Barbie does.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. The academy announced recently that they're going to be adding a new category, which I was super interested in. It's for Best Casting. That's going to start in 2026, I think, right?

Michael Schulman: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: What are some other categories that you might want to see added if you were in charge?

Michael Schulman: [chuckles] Well, the other one that people have been advocating for for a long time is Best Stunts. There are stunt coordinators in the academy and they have been pushing and pushing. I don't know if this casting decision has given them more of a glimmer of hope or less. Another idea that I've heard bandied about that is interesting is Best First Film, which has lift up a first-time filmmaker. Someone like Celine Song, who's nominated this year. Her first movie, Past Lives, is nominated for Best Picture. That would be a really natural way to not anoint someone but boost someone who made an incredible first film. Yes, there's just so much. I'm not personally in favor of adding a ton of awards because, to be frank, the show's long enough already.

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Especially with the big musical numbers, right? They used to be there. I think they are slightly less now. Looking ahead in the last minute that we have here, what do you think is the biggest current challenge to the future of the academy and of the Oscars?

Michael Schulman: It's ratings. The ratings went way down during the pandemic. They've been creeping up, but people don't watch TV the same way anymore. It's really hard to get all of America, much less the world, to watch the same thing on TV on a Sunday night. The academy is still struggling to get that mass audience back. What's interesting this year is that they have two gigantic hits in the race. Barbie and Oppenheimer. I'm sure they're hoping. I'll be interested to see if this pans out if that translates into more viewers.

Kousha Navidar: Then the 10 seconds we have left, is there anything else that you'd be interested in watching for on Sunday?

Michael Schulman: Oh, I'm here for the surprises. I always wait for Oscar drama and chaos, so I want to be shocked and surprised.

Kousha Navidar: [chuckles] Well, we'll see how much shock and surprise there will be. There's two huge movies like you mentioned that I think is going to draw in a lot of people. Barbie and Oppenheimer. Michael, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Michael Schulman is author and a New York staff writer. He is the author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. It chronicles the history of the Academy Awards. If you want more information about what you watch Sunday, it'll give it to you. Michael, thank you so much.

Michael Schulman: Thanks for having me.