While the world’s eyes Sunday night were focused on the actors, video clips and red carpet gowns at the 79th Academy Awards show, their ears were being treated to melodies and rhythms—both in the Oscar-winning films and live broadcast—of the members of Professional Musicians/AFM Local 47.

Local 47 members composed and performed on the musical scores of 10 films that received 39 Oscar nominations and won 10 Oscars.

This is a cross-post by Labor Lou. 

A neighborhood on the eastern edge of the L.A. basin and shorthand for the movie and television industries, Hollywood had its own city charter for fewer than 10 years before being annexed by Los Angeles in 1910. By joining L.A., it gained access to the water supply then beginning to flow by aqueduct from the Owens Valley, 233 miles to the north.

D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and Charlie Chaplin filmed there but now, in fact, studios and related businesses are situated throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with particular concentrations in Culver City, Burbank, the San Fernando Valley and—of course—the part of town known as Hollywood.

With workers’ rights under attack, new labor partnerships like the merger of SAG-AFTRA “represents a bright spot in the union movement," said SAG-AFTRA Co-President Roberta Reardon.

SAG-AFTRA today received a national charter from the AFL-CIO. SAG-AFTRA joins 55 other unions, comprising more than 12 million working men and women, under the AFL-CIO banner. SAG and AFTRA voted to merge earlier this year. 

Members of the Screen Actors (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) have overwhelmingly approved merging their unions into one, SAG/AFTRA, the unions announced this afternoon in Los Angeles.