What Time are the Oscars 2018? Far from the eagerly anticipated and globally televised event it is today, the first Academy Awards ceremony took place out of the public eye during an Academy banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Two hundred seventy people attended the May 16, 1929 dinner in the hotel's Blossom Room; guest tickets cost $5. And there was little suspense when the awards were presented that night, as the recipients had already been announced three months earlier.
That all changed the following year, however, when the Academy kept the results secret until the ceremony but gave a list in advance to newspapers for publication at 11 p.m. on the night of the Awards. This policy continued until 1940 when, much to the Academy's surprise, the Los Angeles Times broke the embargo and published the names of the winners in its evening edition – which was readily available to guests arriving for the ceremony. That prompted the Academy in 1941 to adopt the sealed-envelope system still in use today.
As the event grew in size, banquets became impractical and the event moved from banquet room to a theater venue beginning with the 16th Oscar ceremony in 1944, held at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Since 2001, the Oscar ceremony has been held in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, just steps from the historic Chinese Theatre.