This year’s Scientific & Technical Academy Awards featured an unusually large number of honorees — 52 individuals representing 19 technical achievements, plus career honorees — but it also summed up the digital revolution that has swept through the filmed entertainment industry

On the one hand, an Academy Award of Merit (that is, an actual Oscar statutette) was awarded “to all those who built and operated film laboratories, for over a century of service to the motion picture industry.” It’s the first time the Acad has ever given an Oscar to a large group of people, and an unprecedented salute to a segment of the film biz that is passing into history.

The Award of Merit is reserved for achievements that have stood the test of time, and the vanishing photochemical crafts certainly have done that, but more than a dozen Academy certificates and plaque were given to more recent innovations, most of them digital filmmaking tools. »