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The Golden Glory of Silver Screen

Introduction:

The Academy Awards are one of several awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States to recognize achievements in the film industry. The Academy, located in Beverly Hills, California, presents the awards annually. The awards were first presented in 1929. Winners of the awards receive a gold-plated metal statuette called an Oscar. The Academy's voting members select the most deserving films. The Oscars are considered the most prestigious awards in the film industry. In February or March, the main award categories, known as the Academy Awards of Merit, are presented at a ceremony in Hollywood, which is broadcast live on television. It is the oldest entertainment awards ceremony in the world and the oldest of the four major annual entertainment awards in America. The second awards ceremony in 1930 was the first broadcast on radio. The 1953 ceremony was the first to be broadcast on television. The Tony Awards for theater, the Emmy Awards for television, and the Grammy Awards for music are modeled after the Academy Awards. The Oscars' design depicts a knight presented in an Art Deco style.

Table of contents:

• What are Oscar Award?
• History of Academic Award
• Categories and Rules of Oscar Award
• Significance of Oscar Award
• The Oscar Statuette
• List of notable Oscar winners by year
• Recent Highlights from 2025, the 97th Academy Awards

 

• What are Oscar Award?

The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, are an annual awards ceremony that honors excellence in the film industry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honorary organization with over 9,000 members, presents these awards yearly. The first Oscars ceremony was held in 1929 and is currently the most prestigious awards ceremony in the film industry. It is usually held in late February or early March. It is broadcast live on television in over 225 countries worldwide.

• History of Academic Award:

The first Academy Awards were held on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, attended by about 270 people. The next ceremony was held at the Mayfair Hotel. Guest tickets to the ceremony cost $5, equivalent to $92 in 2024. The first year, the ceremony lasted 15 minutes, and a total of fifteen statuettes were presented to directors, artists, and other participants in the film industry for their merits. The winners were announced to the media three months in advance. For the remainder of the first decade of the awards ceremony, starting in 1930, the second ceremony was held in 1930, with the results published in newspapers at 11:00 p.m. In 1940, the Los Angeles Times announced the winners before the ceremony began, and in 1941, the Academy began announcing the winners in a sealed envelope.

• Categories of Oscar Award:

The Award is given to the winners selected from the following 23 categories:

1. Best Picture
2. Director
3. Original Screenplay
4. Actor
5. Actress
6. Supporting Actor
7. Supporting Actress
8. Cinematography
9. Adapted Screenplay
10. Editing
11. Production Design
12. Original Song
13. Original Score
14. Makeup and Hairstyling,
15. Design
16. Sound
17. Visual Effects
18. Animated Feature Film
19. Foreign Language Film
20. Documentary Feature
21. Documentary Short
22. Animated Short
23. Live-Action Short

The Academy also awards the Scientific and Technical Awards, Honorary Awards, Special Achievement Awards, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for Excellence in Production, and the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for Technical Contribution, which are not given yearly. In August 2018, the Academy announced it would add an annual section for "Outstanding Achievement in Popular Cinema" from the 2019 ceremony. But criticism and confusion led to this decision being shelved.

• Rules of Oscar Award:

The rules for being eligible for an Oscar in a given year are:

• A film must be shown publicly in a commercial theater in Los Angeles for at least one week between January 1 and December 31 for a set fee. However, foreign-language films are not subject to this rule.
• For documentaries and short films, producers must formally register their nominations, and the eligibility criteria are different.
• A form is submitted by artists to select the Best Music Award.
• The Academy is divided into different branches of filmmaking, and the nominees for each category are selected by members of the respective branch. That is, writers nominate writers, and directors nominate directors.
• Only full members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominate candidates for the Oscar for Best Picture and can determine and vote for the winners in most categories.

• Significance of Oscar Award:

The Oscars are the most prestigious awards in the film industry. They are considered the highest achievement in the film industry and a symbol of excellence in filmmaking worldwide. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) presents these awards annually to recognize outstanding acting, writing, directing, and technical aspects of a film. This honor essentially represents the pinnacle of achievement in the film business. The notable significance of the awards is given below:

• Prestige: The Oscars are awarded through a rigorous selection process by a large group of industry professionals. Therefore, it is considered a special achievement. It often plays a significant role in enhancing an individual's career and reputation through increased media attention, higher salaries, and better film offers.
• Global reputation: The Oscar trophy is one of the most prestigious in the world, making it culturally significant and influential.

• Impact on the film industry: In addition to providing international recognition, the Oscars help attract more attention to a film and influence audience preferences, which in turn affects the success of the film by significantly increasing box office revenue.

• The Oscar Statuette:

Design: The trophy is shaped like a knight holding a sword standing on a film reel with five spokes in the Art Deco style. The five spokes represent the five main branches of the Academy (producer, writer, director, actor, and technician). Set on a black metal base made of bronze and plated with 24-karat gold, the statue is 34.3 cm (13.5 in) tall and weighs 3.4 kg (8.5 lb.). The award is given to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) art director Cedric Gibbons. The original statue was created by sculptor George Stanley based on Gibbons' design. Although primarily made of metal, due to metal shortages during World War II, the statues were made of plaster. Although the statues are now made of gold-plated Britannia, the design remains unchanged. However, the height of the trophy was increased in 1945. The original Oscar mold was cast in 1928 at the C.W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, Illinois, and in 1970, the Oscar statues were cast in Crystal Lake, Illinois. From 1983 to 2015, approximately 50 Oscars were made each year by R.S. Owens & Company in Chicago from gold-plated tin. The process took three to four weeks. In 2016, bronze was again used as the base metal for these statues. Later, when production of the statue was transferred to the New York-based Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry, the statues were cast to modern-day dimensions and on black pedestals, based on a digital scan of an original 1929 Oscar. The statues are cast in liquid bronze from 3D-printed ceramic molds, polished, and electroplated with 24-karat gold by Brooklyn, New York-based Epner Technology. It takes about three months to make 50 such statues.

Naming: Academy librarian and President Margaret Herrick claimed in 1921 that she named it after her alleged uncle Oscar. She used a 1938 Los Angeles Examiner clipping as evidence, in which Herrick used the phrase "How's your Uncle Oscar" in a story about her and her husband joking with each other. In 1962, Bette Davis stated in her autobiography that she had named it after her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, in 1936, and that the statue's back bears a resemblance to her husband. However, the word 'Oscar' had been used at least two years earlier. Later, in 1974, in a biography by Whitney Stine, Davis wrote with her commentary, "I am the only one who renounces this claim once and for all - therefore, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the honor is yours".

Columnist Sidney Skolsky also wrote in his 1970 memoir that he used the term under deadline pressure in 1934, when vaudeville comedians asked, "Oscar, will you smoke a cigar?" In his column of March 16, 1934, the Academy credited Skolsky with the "first confirmed newspaper mention" of the Oscars, which gave rise to the idea of ​​the sixth Academy Awards. But the newspaper in which Skolsky wrote that, the statuettes were called 'Oscars,' the name was already in use.

Former Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis credits the nickname to Academy Secretary Elinor Lillberg, who was the Academy's secretary when the awards were first introduced and oversaw the ceremony before they were presented. The reason for the credit is that Elinor's brother Einar Lillberg's autobiography mentions Einar Oscar, a Norwegian army veteran they knew in Chicago and who was always described as "straight and tall". He insists that the credit "almost certainly belongs to Lillberg."

Then, Dr. Waldemar Dalenogare Neto, a Brazilian researcher, in 2021, found the first mention of the name "Oscar" in the December 5, 1933 "Cinematers" column of the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record by journalist Relman Morin. But since the awards ceremony was not held that year, he said, "What happened to the annual Academy banquet? As a rule, the banquet and the presentation of the 'Oscar,' the bronze statuette awarded for the best performance, are long gone." This information later disproved Sidney Skolsky's claim.

Engraving: To keep the identities of the Oscar winners’ secret before the ceremony, the baseplates of the Oscar statues at the ceremony are left blank. Until 2010, winners had to return their respective Oscar statues to the Academy for engraving, which took several weeks. Since then, the winners' names have been engraved on the statues at an engraving-processing station at the Governors' Ball immediately after the Oscars. Subsequently, the R.S. Owens Company has produced nameplates engraved with the names of each potential winner before the ceremony, and the nameplates of non-winning nominees have been reused.

• List of notable Oscar winners by year:

Best Picture:

• 2011: The Departed.
• 2012: Slumdog Millionaire.
• 2013: The Hurt Locker.
• 2014: The King's Speech.
• 2015: The Artist.
• 2016: Argo.
• 2017: 12 Years a Slave.
• 2018: Birdman.
• 2019: Spotlight.
• 2020: Moonlight.
• 2021: The Shape of Water.
• 2022: Green Book.
• 2023: Parasite.
• 2024: Nomadland.

Best Actor:

• 2011: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart).
• 2012: Colin Firth (The King's Speech).
• 2013: Jean Dujardin (The Artist).
• 2014: Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln).
• 2015: Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club).
• 2016: Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln).
• 2017: Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club).
• 2018: Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything).
• 2019: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant).
• 2020: Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea).
• 2021: Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour).
• 2022: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody).
• 2023: Joaquin Phoenix (Joker).
• 2024: Anthony Hopkins (The Father).

Best Actress:

• 2011: Natalie Portman (Black Swan).
• 2012: Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady).
• 2013: Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook).
• 2014: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine).
• 2015: Julianne Moore (Still Alice).
• 2016: Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook).
• 2017: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine).
• 2018: Julianne Moore (Still Alice).
• 2019: Brie Larson (Room).
• 2020: Emma Stone (La La Land).
• 2021: Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).
• 2022: Olivia Colman (The Favourite).
• 2023: Renée Zellweger (Judy).
• 2024: Frances McDormand (Nomadland).

• Recent Highlights from 2025, the 97th Academy Awards:

• Picture: Anora.
• Director: Sean Baker (Anora).
• Actor: Adrien Brody (The Brutalist).
• Actress: Mikey Madison (Anora).
• Supporting Actor: Zachary Golinger (A Real Pain).
• Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez).

Conclusion:

The Oscars, the film industry's most prestigious awards, celebrate excellence in all aspects of cinema. They are presented annually to honor outstanding achievements in acting, directing, writing, and the technical aspects of filmmaking. The event celebrates talent in cinema as well as the diversity, innovation, and artistic expression of culture and the arts. It also plays a significant role in inspiring filmmakers and audiences worldwide. Despite its controversies, the Oscars have played an important role in shaping the global film industry, recognizing creative talent and setting standards for storytelling and technical excellence in cinema