HISTORY OF OSCAR AWARD

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The Academy Award of Merit, or the Oscar Statuette, designed to symbolize film achievement, is constructed of gold-plated britannium on a black metal base, stands at over a foot tall, and weighs eight and a half pounds. It is designed as an Art Deco styled knight poised with a sword in hand, standing upon a film reel with five spokes, each of which symbolize the original five branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Producers, Directors, Writers, Actors, and Technicians. (Now the Academy is divided into fifteen branches: actors, directors, cinematographers, producers, executives, writers, art directors, musicians, sound, visual effects, make up artists and hairstylists, public relations, documentary, feature animation, and short film.)

The Academy did not officially nickname the trophy as the Oscar until 1939, but the beginnings of the statuette's nickname, Oscar, are dubious. Battling stories include:

• A biography of the actress Bette Davis which suggests that she named her 1936 Academy Award after her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson.

• A 1934 Time magazine article by Sidney Skolsky referred to Katharine Hepburn's trophy for Best Actress that year as an "Oscar"

• Walt Disney thanking the Academy for his "Oscar" in 1932.

• Margaret Herrick, then Executive Secretary for the Academy, allegedly musing in 1931 that the award resembled her cousin Oscar Pierce, after which a newspaper columnist who had been present during the observation noted the nickname in a byline afterward.

• Louis B. Mayer's executive secretary, Eleanor Lilleberg, seeing the first statuette in 1928 and declaring that it looked like King Oscar, and referring to him by the name Oscar again later in the day.

Cedric Gibbons, MGM's art director, had developed the design on a scroll in 1927, using Mexican director and actor Emilio Fernandez as a model for the figure of the knight, and then supervised its progress from there. George Stanley, a sculptor, molded a clay sculpture of the design; then Sachin Smith cast the sculpture in tin and copper, and plated it in gold. Initially, the statuettes were made of solid bronze plated with gold, but eventually britannia metal replaced bronze in the making. As a pewter-like alloy, the britannia metal makes it easier to accomplish a smooth finish for the trophy. Finally, each nearly finished trophy is plated in copper, nickel, silver, and then 24-karat gold. From 1943-1945, the final years of World War II, to support America's war efforts during the metals shortage, the trophies were finished using painted plaster in place of gold. After the war ended, the Academy invited the winners of the plaster statuettes to trade their trophies in for the gold-plated ones. These amazing trophies take a bit more work than your average corporate crystal award.

Originally, C.W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, Illinois cast the Oscar statuette mold each year; but since 1983, the awards have been made by R.S. Owens & Company in Chicago, Illinois. Each January, about fifty new statuettes are created for that year's honorees, although the makers never know for sure how many will actually be distributed until the sealed envelopes are opened and that year's winners are announced. Any awards that remain undistributed in a given year are locked away in the safety of the Academy's vault until the following year's ceremony.

During some early years, the delivery of the newly crafted Oscar statuettes from Chicago to Los Angeles was shaped into an event for Academy publicity. More commonly, however, they were delivered across the country by carrier - until the year 2000, when they shipment was stolen from the loading dock of the carrier a few weeks before they were to be presented. Although the stolen shipment was tracked down within a week, the Academy not only instituted the precautions of arranging delivery of the trophies by way of a special flight through United Airlines, but also keeps enough awards for a year's ceremony stored away in its vault at all times.

Since 1950, Oscar winners and their heirs have been prohibited from selling Oscar statuettes without having first offered to sell them back to the Academy for one dollar, at which point the statuette is returned to the Academy's treasury. In the absence of this stipulation, public auctions and private deals have resulted in the sale of Oscar statuettes for six-figure amounts. The Academy has won some legal battles to prohibit such sales on an individual basis, but still, some sale efforts have ended in success.

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