March 28, 2022 will go down in history as the day of Apple’s first Oscar. But March 29, 1989 is the date of Steve Jobs’ first Oscar, when he was not at Apple, because he was thrown out of there. He was at Pixar. That was about to fail.
Actually it didn’t even exist, it was a computer graphics division of George Lucas’ Lucasfilm. It had become independent, taking the name Pixar, in 1986, thanks to the fact that Steve Jobs, who had been ousted by Apple the year before, had decided to invest in it personally. Things weren’t going well at Pixar when John Lasseter (write this name down if you don’t know him: this is a genuine genius), convinced Jobs to make him make an animation short, Lux, starring a lamp (which is more or less the current symbol of Pixar). That short film had an enthusiastic reception at Siggraph, the industry’s premier event, and an Oscar nomination.
Then Lasseter convinced Jobs to invest another $ 300,000 in it a short second of 5 minutes, Tin Toy, protagonist is a tin toy. He was practically the ancestor of the legendary and highly awarded Toy Story. And in 1989 it won the Oscar, it was the first computer-made film to win an Oscar. John Lasseter and William Reeves went to the stage, the producer: they said it was the first time that an Oscar went to “a computer animated film”; they shared the award with the “computer graphics community”, they observed that the computer did not create the film, it was people who did it, then they thanked a lot of people and in the end Lasseter urlò nel microfono: “Steve Jobs! Steve Jobs! Thank you very much”.
Pixar’s big story began that night in Los Angeles, with the success of a 5-minute short film on a tin toy.