Academy Awards
The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements, as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Oscars are widely considered to be the most prestigious awards in the film industry.
The major award categories, known as the Academy Awards of Merit, are presented during a live televised Hollywood ceremony in February or March. It is the oldest worldwide entertainment awards ceremony. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929. The second ceremony, in 1930, was the first to be broadcast by radio, and the 1953 ceremony was the first to be televised. It is the oldest of the four major annual American entertainment awards. Its counterparts — the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, and the Grammy Awards for music — are modeled after the Academy Awards.
The Oscar statuette depicts a knight, rendered in the Art Deco style.
History
The first Academy Awards presentation was held on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner function at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, with an audience of about 270 people.The post-awards party was held at the Mayfair Hotel. The cost of guest tickets for that night's ceremony was . Fifteen statuettes were awarded, honoring artists, directors, and other participants in the film-making industry of the time, for their works during the 1927–28 period. The ceremony ran for 15minutes.
For this first ceremony, winners were announced to the media three months earlier. For the second ceremony in 1930, and the rest of the first decade, the results were given to newspapers for publication at 11:00pm on the night of the awards. In 1940, the Los Angeles Times announced the winners before the ceremony began. As a result, in 1941 the Academy started using a sealed envelope to reveal the names of the winners.
The term "Oscar" is a registered trademark of the AMPAS.
Milestones
The first Best Actor awarded was Emil Jannings, for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. As he had to return to Europe before the ceremony, the Academy agreed to give him the prize early, making him the first Academy Award recipient. For the first Awards, winners were recognized for multiple films during the qualifying period; Jannings received the award for two films in which he starred, and Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award for performances in three films. Beginning with the second ceremony, performers received separate nominations for individual films; no performer has received multiple nominations in the same category since the 3rd Academy Awards.For the first five ceremonies, the eligibility period ran from August 1 to July 31. The 6th Academy Awards' eligibility ran from August 1, 1932, to December 31, 1933, and as of the 7th Academy Awards, subsequent eligibility periods have matched the calendar year.
Best Foreign Language Film, now known as Best International Feature Film, was introduced at the 20th Academy Awards as a special award, and became a competitive category at the 29th Academy Awards.
The 74th Academy Awards, held in 2002, presented the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, won by Shrek.
Since 1973, all Academy Awards ceremonies, except for 2021, have ended with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Traditionally, the previous year's winners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor present the awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, and vice versa. In 2009, this model was replaced by each acting award being introduced by five previous winners, each of whom introduces one of the nominated performances, referred to as the "Fab 5" presenters format. The Fab 5 model returned in 2024 after a 15-year hiatus.
On February 9, 2020, Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards.
The 93rd Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the best films of 2020 and early 2021, was held on April 25, 2021, after it was postponed from its original February 28, 2021, schedule due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cinema. As with the two previous ceremonies, there was no host. The ceremony was broadcast on ABC. It took place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California for the 19th consecutive year, with satellite locations at Union Station also in Los Angeles. Because of the virus impact on films and TV industries, Academy president David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson announced that for the 2021 Oscar Ceremony, streaming films with a previously planned theatrical release were eligible. The theatrical requirement was reinstated starting with the 95th Academy Awards.
Oscar statuette
Overview
The Oscar statuette, officially the Academy Award of Merit, is given to winners of each year's awards. Made of gold-plated bronze on a black metal base, it is tall, weighs and depicts a knight rendered in Art Deco style holding a sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes. The five spokes represent the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers, and Technicians.Sculptor George Stanley, who also did the Muse Fountain at the Hollywood Bowl, sculpted Cedric Gibbons' design. The statuettes presented at the initial ceremonies were gold-plated solid bronze. Within a few years, the bronze was abandoned in favor of Britannia metal, a pewter-like alloy that is then plated in copper, nickel silver, and finally, 24-karat gold. Due to a metal shortage during World War II, Oscars were made of painted plaster for three years. Following the war, the Academy invited recipients to redeem the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones.
File:Cedric Gibbons Best Art Direction April 1930.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Cedric Gibbons was the original designer of the Oscar statuette.
The only addition to the Oscar since it was created is a minor streamlining of the base. The original Oscar mold was cast in 1928 at the C.W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, Illinois, which also contributed to casting the molds for the Vince Lombardi Trophy and Emmy Award statuettes. From 1972 to 1986, the Oscar statues were cast at the Dodge Trophy Company in Crystal Lake, Illinois. From 1987 to 2015, approximately 50 Oscars in a tin alloy with gold plating were made each year in Chicago by Illinois manufacturer R.S. Owens & Company. It would take between three and four weeks to manufacture 50 statuettes.
In 2016, the Academy returned to bronze as the core metal of the statuettes, handing manufacturing duties to Walden, New York-based Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry, now owned and operated by UAP Urban Art Projects. While based on a digital scan of an original 1929 Oscar, the statuettes retain their modern-era dimensions and black pedestal. Cast in liquid bronze from 3D-printed ceramic molds and polished, they are then electroplated in 24-karat gold by Brooklyn, New York-based Epner Technology. The time required to produce 50 such statuettes is roughly three months. R.S. Owens is expected to continue producing other awards for the Academy, and service existing Oscars that need replating.
Naming
The origin of the nickname of the trophy has been disputed, as multiple people have taken credit for naming the trophy "Oscar".Margaret Herrick, librarian and president of the Academy, may have said she named it after her supposed uncle Oscar in 1931. The only corroboration was a 1938 clipping from the Los Angeles Examiner, in which Herrick told a story of her and her husband joking with each other using the phrase, "How's your uncle Oscar".
Bette Davis, in her 1962 autobiography, claimed she named it in 1936 after her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, of whom the statue's rear end reminded her. But the term had been in use at least two years before. In a 1974 biography written by Whitney Stine with commentary from Davis, Davis wrote, "I relinquish once and for all any claim that I was the one—so, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the honor is all yours."
Columnist Sidney Skolsky wrote in his 1970 memoir that he came up with the term in 1934 under pressure for a deadline, mocking Vaudeville comedians who asked "Will you have a cigar, Oscar?" The Academy credits Skolsky with "the first confirmed newspaper reference" to Oscar in his column on March 16, 1934, which was written about that year's 6th Academy Awards. But in the newspaper clipping that Skolsky referred to, he wrote that "these statues are called 'Oscars, meaning that the name was already in use.
In 2021, Brazilian researcher Waldemar Dalenogare Neto contradicted Skolsky's claim to have used the term first, finding the probable first public mention of the name "Oscar" in journalist Relman Morin's "Cinematters" column in the Los Angeles Evening Record on December 5, 1933. Since the awards didn't take place that year, he said: "What's happened to the annual Academy banquet? As a rule, the banquet and the awarding of "Oscar", the bronze statuette given for best performances, is all over long before this."
Bruce Davis, a former executive director of the Academy, credited Eleanore Lilleberg, a secretary at the Academy when the award was first introduced, for the nickname. She had overseen the pre-ceremony handling of the awards. Davis credits Lilleberg because he found in an autobiography of Einar Lilleberg, Eleanore's brother, that Einar had referenced a Norwegian army veteran named Oscar whom the two knew in Chicago, whom Einar described as having always "stood straight and tall". He asserts credit "should almost certainly belong to" Lilleberg.