Christopher Beach and Thomas Schatz Named Academy Film Scholars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has named Christopher Beach and Thomas Schatz as its 2012 Academy Film Scholars. The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee, which selected the two based on their manuscript proposals, will present them with the first half of two $25,000 grants at a private luncheon on March 18.

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Tinto Balio, the Academy’s inaugural Film Scholar in 2000, also is scheduled to present highlights from his book The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946-1973 at a free public event at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater on March 18.

Beach, an independent scholar based in Vermont, is working on The Image on the Screen: Directors, Cinematographers, and the Collaborative Process, a study of motion picture director-cinematographer collaborations in which he will argue for the need to move beyond the auteurist paradigm and examine more closely the complex interaction between directors and other creative contributors.

Schatz, the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, is completing a historical study of the American film industry in the period since the 1989 creation of Time-Warner and Sony-Columbia, which he has dubbed the “conglomerate age” in reference to the wave of mergers and acquisitions that transformed the movie industry.

In his book, Balio, professor emeritus of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses how American audiences and critics responded to the works of such international filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to “stimulate and support the creation of new and significant works of film scholarship about aesthetic, cultural, educational, historical, theoretical or scientific aspects of theatrical motion pictures.” The Academy’s cultural and educational wing – the Academy Foundation – annually grants more than $1 million to film scholars, cultural organizations and film festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad.