Trivia

Nobody can guarantee where the nickname Oscar® comes from, and so a few versions of its origin have naturally sprung up in the city built on fiction:

A secretary, when examining the newly created statuette, was reported to have exclaimed – “Why, he looks like my Uncle Oscar!” This is highly credible, as women in the 30’s often started sentences with “Why…”

The not-so-shrinking-violet Bette Davis has taken credit for coming up with the name, after winning her first of two Oscars® for Best Actress in 1935 – “I was married at that time to Harmon O. Nelson. For a long time I did not know what his middle name was. I found out one day that it was Oscar, and it seemed a very suitable nickname for the Academy statuette.”
Bette Davis offered to fight anyone who didn’t believe her.

But it is the reporter Sidney Skolsky who is said to have the best claim on the name. He wrote “Oscar” in an article in 1934, when referring to Katherine Hepburn’s award. He claimed that the name was taken from the start of an old joke “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?”. Hmm.

Wherever it came from, The Academy adopted the nickname officially in 1939.

Throughout its 81 year history, the statuettes presented have always been made of some form of metal, with the exception of three years during World War II. As a result of a metal shortage, the statuettes were made of painted plaster. After the war ended, winners were allowed to exchange their plastic models for gold-plated ones.

In 1934, the Academy employed accounting firm Price Waterhouse (later to become PricewaterhouseCoopers) to tabulate the ballots and ensure the secrecy of results. The firm continues to do this job to this day.

The Oscars® have only be re-scheduled three times; the first was in 1938, when floods in LA delayed the ceremony by a week; then, in 1968, the awards were scheduled for 8 April, just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. With his funeral planned for 9 April, the Oscars® were pushed back to 10 April out of respect; finally, in 1981, the Oscars® were delayed by a day after an assassination attempt was made on the life of then President Ronald Reagan. 

When Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Oscar®, for her part in “Gone With the Wind,” she had to sit in a segregated part of the auditorium. Then, to add further insult to injury, the Oscar® that she won went missing - and has never been recovered since. After McDaniel's death, she willed it to Howard University. It disappeared during civil disturbances at the college in the 1960s and The Academy has refused to replace it.

There is some dispute over the shortest-ever nominated performance. Some claim the shortest Oscar-nominated performance is five minutes and 40 seconds by Beatrice Straight in “Network”, but others claim this performance is actually eight minutes. Competition comes from Sylvia Miles’ performance in “Midnight Cowboy,” which is clocked as six minutes long.

For a movie to be considered for the Best Picture award, it has to be at least 40 minutes long.

Marlon Brando refused his award for Best Actor in 1972 for The Godfather, citing the film industry's discrimination and mistreatment of Native Americans.

When Clark Gable's Best Actor Oscar® for 1934's "It Happened One Night" came up for auction in 1996, it was snapped up for over $600,000 by an anonymous bidder, who later turned out to be Steven Spielberg. The director donated it back to the Academy.

©A.M.P.A.S.®