Longtime film academy chief executive Bruce Davis dies at 83

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Set us as preferred Bruce Davis spent more than two decades as the motion picture academy’s chief executive.Even when he retired in 2011, it was not because he didn’t still love the work.

In fact, he kept at it in retirement, retaining an office at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study where he focused on writing a definitive history of the early days of the Oscars.“I don’t think I’ve been bored for a minute in 30 years here,” Davis told the Associated Press upon leaving the academy.

“I feel like such a rube sometimes.To this day, when I get out of the car on Oscar night and step up there onto that carpet, you get that rush of energy.

The lights are popping — not that anybody’s aiming at me — but still I think it’s one of the great rushes, emotionally speaking, that a person can have.”Following a battle with leukemia, Davis died Saturday.He was 83.

Davis’ career at the academy was, according to wife Joann, partly a matter of being in the right place at the right time.“Not that he wasn’t really good at what he did,” she says by phone.

“But he was also a lucky man.”Davis was working as chair of the theater department at Juniata College in Pennsylvania when he and Joann loaded all of their belongings atop their Mazda GLC and headed to Los Angles in pursuit of Hollywood dreams.Davis had been working on a few screenplays while teaching, and his agent told him needed to move closer to the action to network and take meetings.

“Neither of us had jobs when we left Pennsylvania,” Joann says.“We just bit the bullet and drove out.

It was a leap of faith.”Shortly after arriving, Davis met someone at a party whose wife worked at the motion picture academy.That soon led to Davis taking a job arranging lectures and seminars and, later, overseeing the organization’s public programmin...