Did departing academy chief Dawn Hudson ruin the Oscars — or save them?
LOS ANGELES — When Dawn Hudson stood before the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in spring 2011 to make her pitch for the newly created job of chief executive, the organization appeared to be operating on cruise control.
Ratings for the Oscars remained robust, with the previous year’s telecast watched by more than 40 million viewers. The academy’s TV deal with ABC guaranteed that a billion dollars in revenue would pump into the group’s already ample coffers over the next decade. The closest thing to recent Oscar controversies centered on taste — the much-maligned “Crash” winning best picture over “Brokeback Mountain” in 2006 — and whether James Franco was stoned when he co-hosted the show with Anne Hathaway in 2011.
Feeling secure in the group’s status as the prestigious, enduring face of Hollywood, some on the 43-member board believed the academy simply needed a caretaker to maintain the course set by retiring Executive Director Bruce Davis, who had held the position for 30 years.
Hudson — an academy outsider, originally from Hot Springs, Arkansas, who had spent the previous two decades running the far smaller nonprofit Film Independent — saw things differently, and she told the board so in plain terms. It would take two presentations to persuade the academy’s governors to hire her.
“There wasn’t an obvious crisis that said, ‘You’re heading for the iceberg,’ but I felt we were,” Hudson, 65, says over Zoom from her Los Angeles home, just days after officially ending her tenure as the academy’s leader on July 1. “We couldn’t continue being this exclusionary kind of ivory-tower academy and be successful, be relevant, be the leaders we wanted to be. I perceived a crisis in the making, and so did a majority of the board, which is why I was hired. Not everyone had that same perception.”
Eleven years later, not everyone has the same perception of
