Why is an Academy Award called an Oscar? There are many theories, but no one knows the actual reason why.
The Academy Awards are awarded once a year, usually in February or March. They are the most important and coveted of all the awards for movies. They are watched by millions of people around the world, although view figures have generally been declining over the last few decades. In America, in 2000, 46.3 million people tuned in to watch the awards. Last year, in 2024, the number was down to 19.5 million. Possibly interest is waning. Still, winning an award can turn a movie into a blockbuster and it can turn an actor into a star.
The very first Academy Award show was held on May 16, 1929 in a hotel in Hollywood. 270 people attended and 15 Oscars were given. The best picture went to Wings, which was a silent movie that was released with synchronized sound. It was a romantic action-war picture, which is not a category we often see. The best Oscars for acting went to Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor. The idea of having an award show appears to have evolved over the space of about 2 years. In 1927, Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, decide to form a committee to deal with labor disputes in the film industry. The organization became known as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They were pretty much a labor union for the film industry, but they were not very good and they alienated all of the studio employees. By 1928, they had morphed into an honorary organization and had started to think about offering awards to people involved in movies. Over the next year, they ironed out all of the rules, voted on the winners, and held the award ceremony.
The first Oscar statue was cast in 1928. Since then, the design has hardly changed. It is a knight holding a sword and standing in front of a reel of film. The statue is made of a cast bronze core with 24 karat gold plating on the outside. They are 34.3 cm tall, and they weigh 3.856 kg. Since 1950, the Oscars are not completely owned by the people who win them. Well, they are, but they have to be returned to the Academy on the death of the owner. Rather, the Academy has a contractual right to be able to buy the statue back for $1 on the death of the owner, which is pretty much the same thing. The winners are not allowed to sell them or pass them on as an inheritance. Before 1950, the winners owned them outright and could do whatever they wanted with them.
So, why are they called Oscars? The real name of the statue is the Academy Award of Merit. Well, no one really seems to know. There are a fair few people who lay claim to being the person who came up with the name, but there is no definitive proof. We can trace the name backwards to see which of them are not true. The Academy adopted the name Oscar in 1939, so any claims to have come up with the name after that are obviously not true. The two main theories are that the name was coined by a librarian at the Academy called Margaret Herrick or that it was created by a newspaper columnist called Sidney Skolsky. Margaret Herrick was the very first librarian of the Academy and she said that she named the statue after her Uncle Oscar because they looked similar. Her uncle was actually her cousin, and he was called Oscar Pierce. It is claimed that she named it in 1931, but the first mention of this story is in 1938, so it could be possible. Stanley Skolsky said that he came up with the name to make phone of the awards ceremony. He said the ceremony was full of phony dignity and snobbery, so he took a line from Vaudeville, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?” This was a well-known joke and he wanted to make fun of the ceremony. The first occurrence of this story is in a newspaper in 1934, so it predates Margaret Herrick and makes his claim look more likely.
However, in 2001, a Brazilian researcher painstakingly analyzed all the newspapers from the early 1930s and he found a reference to “the Oscars” from December 5, 1933. The fact that the journalist uses “the” Oscars, means the name already exists and that journalist didn’t come up with it. This predates Stanley Skolsky, so he cannot be the person that came up with the name. In all likelihood, it was Margaret Herrick, and many of her friends and colleagues attested at the time to her having come up with the name. Perhaps, if she had known how famous it would have become, she would have copyrighted it. And this is what I learned today.
Image By The Oscars, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60976416
Sources
https://dalenogare.com/2021/06/descoberta-primeira-mencao-ao-nome-oscar-na-imprensa
https://collider.com/oscars-name-history-explained
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Awards
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-we-call-the-oscars-the-oscars
https://www.statista.com/statistics/253743/academy-awards-number-of-viewers
https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1929
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_(1927_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts_and_Sciences