Why are the Academy Awards referred to as the Oscars? Be taught the nickname’s origins for the 2024 ceremony

When presenters open envelopes on stage on the 2024 Academy Awards and announce who the Oscar goes to, they’re going to really be utilizing a nickname that is been round for nearly so long as the award itself. 

The statuette given to winners is technically referred to as the Academy Award of Advantage. It is based mostly on a design by Cedric Gibbons, who was MGM artwork director on the time of the award’s creation. He sketched a knight holding a sword and standing in entrance of a movie reel, based on the Academy. In 1928, they started the method to show that concept right into a statue. 

Nobody is kind of certain precisely when or why the Academy Award of Advantage started to be often called an Oscar. One fashionable concept, based on the Academy Awards, is that Margaret Herrick — former Academy librarian within the Nineteen Thirties and 40s and later govt director —thought that the statuette seemed like her Uncle Oscar. After listening to that, Academy employees began referring to the award as Oscar. 

Foster Hirsch, writer of “Hollywood and the Motion pictures of the Fifties,” mentioned there’s one other concept that he finds extra believable. He mentioned some imagine the time period Oscar originated from Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, who attended the Academy Awards in 1934. 

The first confirmed newspaper reference to the Academy Award as an Oscar got here that 12 months when Skolsky used it in his column in reference to Katharine Hepburn’s first win as finest actress.

“He thought that the ceremonies had been pompous and self-important and he needed to deflate them in his column,” Hirsch mentioned. So Skolsky referred to the statuette as an Oscar, in a reference to Oscar Hammerstein I, a theater proprietor who grew to become the butt of jokes amongst vaudeville communities.

“So it was really a kind of disrespectful and even snide attribution,” Hirsch mentioned of the nickname. “It was meant to deflate the pomposity of the Academy Award of Advantage.”

One other fashionable concept — although the least seemingly — is that Bette Davis got here up with the Oscar identify, Hirsch mentioned. When she gained the award for “Harmful,” in 1936, she apparently remarked that “the again of the Oscar reminded her of her husband” as he left the bathe. Her husband’s center identify was Oscar. 

Nevertheless, Hirsch mentioned the speculation does not likely maintain up as a result of there are earlier citations of the nickname Oscar getting used.

In his e book “75 Years of the Oscar: The Official Historical past of the Academy Awards,” TCM host and movie historian Robert Osborne mentioned the Oscar nickname unfold and took maintain, despite the fact that nobody is aware of precisely who got here up with it.

“[It was] warmly embraced by newsmen, followers and Hollywood citizenry who had been discovering it more and more cumbersome to check with the Academy’s Award of Advantage as ‘the Academy’s gold statue,’ ‘the Academy Award statuette” or, worse, ‘the trophy,'” Osborne wrote.