For several years now, I’ve celebrated the birthday of Cinema Sight along with my own because I couldn’t remember/find data supporting when the site was first created. This year, I uncovered that information, several months after it had already passed, so I was stuck with one big issue. How do I celebrate the 15th Anniversary of Cinema Sight?

It had already passed and my birthday was still a few months away, so I did nothing, much to my personal disappointment. 15 years is nothing to be laughed at, there aren’t many websites still in operation after that many years and being one of the first and oldest Oscar fansites on the internet is cause for celebration. But, again, I missed the whole affair.

So, today, on my birthday, I’m going to wish my site a happy 15th anniversary and promise in the future to plan my anniversary celebrations to coincide with the true origin date of the site (at least the oldest date I can find to associate with the beginning, which I feel is pretty accurate), February 15, 1996.

I’m going to share a couple of links with you from the earliest days of the site and I hope you find them interesting. Please keep in mind, this was 15 years ago, so I make no promises regarding the quality of the content analysis (matter of fact, I even chuckled at a couple of my poorly-phrased bon mots and the naivety of some comments.

• This was my post-ceremony analysis where I compared my own predictions with those of the actual winners. The number next to the winner is an indication of where I ranked it in my predictions (some of these choices I’m rather embarrassed about.
• Here is a list of my pre-Oscar predictions. Again, I was much of a neophyte at this whole thing, so some comments may come off a bit uneducated.
• This is a feature I haven’t done in several years, though I’m not exactly saddened by that. Here’s a list of other predictions I was able to find around the internet. This includes several readers who submitted predictions to me.
• Even at the beginning, I was cataloging the various precursor award winners to see how they compared with the actual winners. It’s interesting to look back at a year when there were only 18 groups predicting Best Picture with their awards. Compare that to 2010 where 32 organizations gave out awards for Best Picture. It had certainly started increasing in number back then, but it is nothing when you look at recent years.

If you’re curious to take more looks back at my varied history with Oscar, you can find them all here. From 1996 to present. Prior years only list nominees and winners (the ceremony details are mostly missing still as I haven’t had time to work on that aspect of the site in some time).

And, thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, here are some links to how the site used to look. Please keep in mind some of the later versions are missing key components of the design file, so the formatting is completely off on those pages. Also, a fair warning, some of these pages may auto-update to a bad archive you can’t look at, so right after you click the link and you see the page starting up, hit the stop button so your page doesn’t load further.

And if you look closely, the site hasn’t always been called “The Oscar Guy” or “Cinema Sight”. It started in 1996 as “Oscars and More”, then it became “Oscars and So Much More…” at some point between 1996 and 1997, then by 1999 it had finally adopted its longtime name “The Oscar Guy”. And for those who are ever curious, it was due to a threat of legal action from the Academy that the new “Cinema Sight” moniker was chosen and, since I have full claim on it, it should never change again.

• July 8, 2011 (most recent archived version of Cinema Sight)
• February 26, 2010 (earliest version of Cinema Sight available)
• February 20, 2010 (the last version of The Oscar Guy site before the transition to Cinema Sight)
• March 9, 2009 (the last view of one of my older layouts for The Oscar Guy)
• June 25, 2007 (the last view of an old design I did for my 10th Anniversary)
• April 24, 2006 (the last view of my prior site design)
• May 25, 2002 (the first appearance of the oscarguy.com domain name)
• February 16, 2002 (this was the newest version of the site prior to my move to the oscarguy.com domain)
• October 3, 2000 (this was the first site redesign I ever completed. It would be the second longest run on a design I would have to date)
• December 21, 1996 (this is the oldest version of the site from back in my GeoCities days. Note the visitor number count at the bottom of the page. This is where I found the origin of my site)