Retro Photo Friday: The First Oscars + an Oscar Round-up!

The photo above is from the first Best Picture Oscar winner ever, The Broadway Melody in 1929. Some interesting facts about the first Oscars:

The movie industry was transitioning between silent films and “talkies.” There was a clear preference for talkies among nominees.
The Broadway Melody is sometimes called “the worst Best Picture.” (I dunno. Could it really be worse than Crash? I turned that movie off in the first 20 minutes.)
One of the 1929 nominees for Best Picture, The Patriot, is a now a lost film. It was the only silent film nominated for Best Picture that year, and the last to be nominated in the category until The Artist.
The 1929 Oscars included a category for “Best Title Cards.”
The first Academy Awards hosted only 270 guests.
The cost of a ticket to attend was $5.
Winners were announced three months before the event took place.

And here’s a roundup of vintage Oscar photos:

Instead of a photo, let’s start with this infographic of all the Best Actress Winners.
And here are those same dresses in a slide show of all Oscar female winners via Vanity Fair.
LIFE’s classic photos from the Oscars is worth a look via Time.
Here’s PopSugar’s take on the 30 Best Oscar dresses ever. (Not sure I agree, but it does have some great ones I forgot about. That said, don’t the truly great dresses stick in your memory?)
There are the Oscar dresses, and then there is the Oscar gossip!