LOS ANGELES — No white smoke rises when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences elects its new president.


But a sigh of relief might slip from its Beverly Hills boardroom on the first Tuesday in August. That is when the academy’s 43 governors are likely to finish the complicated business of replacing their current president, Tom Sherak.


After serving for three years, Mr. Sherak, because of term limits, is leaving a post that has emerged as one of the few bully pulpits in the film business. Over all, Hollywood’s top executives have had a smaller public presence in the last decade or so, largely because their studios have been absorbed by large corporations with interests far beyond the movies.


Jack Valenti is gone, and with him went much of the charisma that powered the Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying group in Washington. Ron Meyer, the quiet man who runs Universal Studios, only rarely speaks for an industry that once listened to his predecessors, Lew Wasserman and Sidney Sheinberg. Other studio chiefs remain similarly quiet.


But Mr. Sherak, whose career in film distribution and marketing has included turns at Revolution Studios and 20th Century Fox, proved to be an outspoken leader who pushed his group, with its membership of roughly 6,000 film professionals, toward a more public pose. So the academy’s presidency has assumed a prominence not matched since celebrities held the position, like Karl Malden, who took office in 1989, or Gregory Peck, who served 20 years earlier.


“The job is defined by personality,” said Mr. Sherak, who last week spoke by telephone about the academy’s election process, and about his own sense of legacy and future challenges.


Mr. Sherak says he is proud, since taking office in 2009, to have joined fellow governors in reaching an agreement that will keep the Academy Awards on ABC through 2020 under a lucrative agreement. In another deal, he and colleagues settled the Oscar ceremony into the newly named Dolby Theater in Hollywood for 20 years. And in yet another, whose final terms have yet to be negotiated, the academy will join the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in developing a film museum.


Fund-raising for the new museum has begun; the academy’s goal, Mr. Sherak said, is to raise $100 million by October, in order to break ground on a project that will take three to five years to complete.


Looking forward, he talked of a need to use the academy’s influence to assure Hollywood’s relevance by opening it to younger and more ethnically diverse film workers. (Diversity is a particular goal of Dawn Hudson, who became the academy’s paid chief executive during Mr. Sherak’s tenure as its unpaid president.)


But the next step will depend heavily on the next president. And he or she will be chosen by a procedure that rivals papal succession in the subtlety of its rituals.


The academy’s various branches — which separately represent directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors and so on — are conducting a weeks-long vote to fill about one-third of the governors’ seats, each of which comes up for election every three years.


Incumbents may serve for nine years, and are almost always re-elected, if they choose to run. The president must be a governor, and is elected annually, but may serve four consecutive years. Mr. Sherak, however, is out after three, because his nine years as a governor are up.


The new board will convene in early August to entertain nominations for president. With no incumbent, it would not be unusual, Mr. Sherak said, to have as many as seven proposed candidates. After a secret ballot, it is customary for the weakest among them to withdraw. The first to cross the 50 percent threshold is elected.


It is all done without campaigning in the conventional sense. Instead, the academy operates something like a private club, in which those who would lead might indicate, discreetly, that they would not mind being asked, but generally limit their pursuit of the top job to private phone calls and luncheon conversations.