Bruce Davis, who ran the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for 22 of his 30 years there, died Saturday evening. He was 83. Leukemia, his wife Joann told The Hollywood Reporter.

Davis wasn't supposed to end up running the Oscars. He came to Los Angeles in 1980 chasing a screenwriting career, having spent years teaching English and medieval literature and chairing the theatre department at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. A chance conversation at a party, someone whose wife worked at the Academy, got him hired within weeks to organise seminars and lectures. That was the whole plan.

It didn't stay small for long. By 1983 he was executive administrator, overseeing the library, archives and public programming. In 1989 the board made him executive director, the top job, succeeding Jim Roberts, who'd held it since 1971. Davis stayed until 2011, working through six Academy presidents and watching staff numbers climb from roughly 75 to 200.

His fingerprints are on a lot of what the Academy looks like today. He moved the Margaret Herrick Library to the Waterworks building in Beverly Hills in 1991, set up the film archive at the Pickford Center in 2002, and spent years pushing for a proper Academy museum, an idea the 2008 recession kept knocking down. He didn't live to see it finished on his watch. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures finally opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 2021, a decade after he'd stepped away.

He announced his retirement in 2010 with a memo that read, in part, that 30 years at the Academy and more than 20 running it "seemed like enough," and that organisations benefit from a change in perspective now and then. Dawn Hudson took over, followed eventually by current CEO Bill Kramer.

The Oscar name, finally traced

Retirement didn't slow him down much. Davis kept an office at the Pickford Center and spent years in the Herrick Library researching a history of the Academy, published by Brandeis University Press in 2022 as The Academy and the Award. The book got closer than anyone had before to solving where the nickname "Oscar" came from, pointing to Eleanore Lilleberg, an early Academy assistant, who is said to have borrowed the name from a Norwegian army veteran she and her brother once knew in Chicago. "Unsought though it was," Davis wrote, "the credit for originating one of the world's best-known nicknames should almost certainly belong to her."

Current Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Lynette Howell Taylor called him a leader who led "with devotion" and had "a profound love for the Academy." Ric Robertson, who took over Davis's old administrator role in 1989 and worked under him for two decades, told THR simply that Davis was "a remarkable man, a great leader, a great mentor and a great friend."

Davis had talked about the pull of Oscar night right up to his last day on the job. "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," he told the Associated Press in 2011. "I have never gotten tired of that."

He's survived by his wife Joann and their four daughters, Brangien, Alexandra, Archer and Roxanne, all of whom were with him at the end.