The first Academy Awards ceremony lasted 15 minutes

Hollywood was on the cusp of some major changes by the late 1920s. The advent of the technology that produced "talkies" such as 1927's The Jazz Singer was certainly one of them, but more concerning to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer was the encroaching threat of unionized labor. Mayer subsequently oversaw the 1927 launch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit created to mediate wage disputes and provide favorable promotion for the movie industry; it soon also oversaw side projects such as a celebration of stars with "awards of merit for distinctive achievement."

The first such celebration took place at the end of a black-tie banquet on May 16, 1929, before 270 guests in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Among the familiar features of this ceremony was a host (in this case, Academy president Douglas Fairbanks) announcing the winners of such categories as Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography. Noticeable differences included the lack of sound feature films for consideration — The Jazz Singer won a special award for "pioneer outstanding talking picture" — and two winners each for Best Picture and Best Direction. There was also zero suspense baked into the evening, as the winners had already been revealed three months earlier. Absent the sort of long-winded speeches that require an orchestra to keep things moving, the entire ceremony lasted a tidy 15 minutes.

Even as Hollywood braced for more turmoil following the October 1929 stock market crash, the Academy moved forward with its second awards ceremony on April 3, 1930. This time, the winners were unknown until announced on stage (save for the newspapers, which were clued in to prepare for evening editions). And this time the event was broadcast on the radio, a big step toward turning what was initially a private party into the major public gala that would mark the biggest night on the Hollywood calendar.

Jerry Lewis had to improvise when the 1959 telecast ended 20 minutes early

As difficult as it is to imagine the normally three-hour-plus Academy Awards finishing early, that’s exactly what happened during the 1959 telecast. Faced with the task of staving off 20 minutes of dead-air time, host Jerry Lewis pulled every possible trick out of his bag: “I proceeded to do schtick and bits and talking to the musicians in the pit and asking someone in the audience if they ever won a prize,” he recalled decades later. Surrounded by the night’s stars on stage, Lewis had them dance to multiple reprises of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” at various points conducting the orchestra and trying his hand at the trumpet, until NBC finally cut away to a sports documentary. Despite his quick thinking, Lewis ultimately became the fall guy for the show’s botched ending. Time writer Richard Corliss later asserted, “Until Nixon’s 18-1/2, Lewis’s 20 were the minutes that lived in pop-culture infamy,” and he pointed to this event as the reason the performer wasn’t invited back to the Oscars stage until receiving a special award in 2009.