Almost 20 months ago, the week he was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Tom Sherak admitted to TheWrap that while he may have the title of president, somebody else really ran the place.
"The buck stops," he said, at the desk of Bruce Davis, the organization's longtime executive director.
But soon, the buck – and the tens of millions of bucks brought in by the Oscar show – will have a new place, or two, at which to stop.
Davis will leave the job he's held for two decades in favor of retirement, driving away from the Wilshire Boulevard office in a Prius that shows just how deeply tied he is to the organization: "AMPAS," his license plates read.
His longtime executive administrator Ric Robertson (left) will land a new title and presumably more money, but a familiar spot in the pecking order: second place.
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Incoming Film Independent chief Dawn Hudson (below) will have a bigger awards show to look after, a more powerful board of directors to contend with, and a shorter trip to her favorite lunch joint.
And the Academy will trade in its executive director slot for two new positions, CEO (Hudson) and COO (Robertson).
In a way, the restructuring fits with an Academy trend of late, in which the organization has brought in two people to do a job that used to be done by one. From 1960 through 2008, for example, the Oscar telecast was produced by a single person for 45 of the 49 ceremonies – but for the last three years in a row, AMPAS chose two-person teams to handle the chores: Bill Condon and Lawrence Mark in 2009, Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman the following year, and Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer this year.
To emcee the show, meanwhile, the Academy departed from a 20-year stretch of solo hosts to name a pair of co-hosts in 2010 (Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin) and 2011 (Anne Hathaway and James Franco).
The latest AMPAS pair will assume their new positions at a time when the organization is at what Davis admitted is something of a crisis point: the recession curtailed some of its projects; the Oscar show is struggling with declining ratings and negative reviews; and a proposal to move the show earlier in the year was tabled for next year's awards, but continues to be under study.
"We need to be feeling our way very carefully to see if there’s still a way to run an operation this complex and this worthwhile in a new kind of environment," Davis told TheWrap.
The desire for change in an organization long on stability and tradition clearly led to a search that went well outside the Academy.
