President Trump announced Friday afternoon on his Truth Social platform that Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, is leaving his position at the head of the Kennedy Center before it closes for scheduled renovations in July.

Trump,, who has been chairman of the Kennedy Center since Feb. 2025, said that he is promoting Matt Floca, the center’s current vice president of operations, to chief operating officer and executive director. Grenell’s departure comes about three months before the Kennedy Center is set to close for renovations, which President Trump has said would take two years.

As NPR reported last month, the renovations as detailed in an internal memo include some facility repairs and cosmetic changes, including to public spaces that were just renovated two years ago. In his Truth Social posting Friday, the president repeated his claim that the renovations will be a “complete reconstruction” of the complex.

Grenell, who served as the center’s president, has a reputation as a Trump loyalist and has frequently deplored what he has called “leftist activists” in the arts. During Grenell’s tenure, which began as interim executive director in Feb. 2025, the Kennedy Center has experienced intense tumult. Numerous prominent artists have canceled their performances and presentations. One of the center’s core tenants, the Washington National Opera, severed its relationship with the Kennedy Center last month. Many longtime staff members have departed. Ticket sales have plummeted.

Grenell, who had no prior arts administration experience prior to his Kennedy Center appointment, told PBS NewsHour in January, “We cannot have arts institutions that lose money.” He insisted that productions at the Kennedy Center needed to be revenue generators or at least revenue-neutral – a non-starter in the performing arts, in which large legacy institutions generally depend on a balance of earned revenue, philanthropic giving and some amount of government grants.

Last November, Senate Democrats opened an investigation against Grenell, accusing him and the current Kennedy Center leadership of cronyism and corruption, citing “millions in lost revenue, luxury spending and preferential treatment for Trump allies.” Grenell denied the allegations in an open letter posted to social media on the official Kennedy Center accounts, which has since been removed.

In his Truth Social post, President Trump praised Grenell, writing: “Ric Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done.”

News of his departure was first reported Friday by Axios.

My New Year’s resolution is to walk in Griffith Park once every other week. This shouldn’t be hard to accomplish — I live a 15-minute walk from one of the main park entrances — and yet, I am averaging more like once a month. Still, those occasional walks are already among my most memorable experiences of the year: the densely green foliage from all the rain, the reward of a strawberry lemonade from the Trails Cafe, lying on the grass in front of the observatory and watching the clouds expand and thin, gossiping with a friend and taking a photo of her against the auburn hills at sunset, hearing hungry coyotes yipping beyond the bushes. It seems that every year the thing I’m missing and striving toward is to be outside more. One time I read a list of suggested new year’s resolutions that included stepping outside as soon as you wake up, to have contact with the Earth first thing. I tried doing this, but I mostly just felt confused and tired under the sun on my front porch, waiting for the Earth to work on me. I’ve since accepted that I am a gal who likes to be in her pajamas for as long as possible in the morning, reading on the couch.

But I need to be outside more. Which is also my way of saying I need to be with others more, I need to pay attention more, I need to be a part of the physical world more.

This issue celebrates the Los Angeles outdoors, the many lives to be lived under its unencumbered sky. There are less rules outside, fewer boundaries: coffee dates prolong, walks meander, thoughts digress. And yes, because we are blessed with famous weather, whole neighborhoods and districts can risk spilling out into the sidewalks, where laughs get louder, music gets blasted and the street fashion becomes a runway. It’s become much too easy to recede into the claustrophobic containers of our depression-inducing screens. Traipsing down the Hollywood Farmers Market with giant heads of lettuce and overgrown bouquets feels not only like release, but also resistance and resilience. We’re still bargaining for gold hoops and oversize blazers at Santee Alley, getting dressed up for each other at the Venezuelan coffee shop on Melrose, and dreaming through the colors of Chinatown. We’re still picnicking under piñatas, and some of us still gather at newsstands to flip through artful magazines and meet like-minded strangers. It can be beautiful out here.

An Oscar statue appears outside the Dolby Theatre ahead of the 2015 ceremony. But who is he really?

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Sunday is the 98th Academy Awards, where many of Hollywood’s top talents will walk the red carpet before settling in for a night of triumphs, heartbreaks and abruptly cut-off acceptance speeches.

Most of us just refer to the ceremony as “the Oscars,” the longstanding nickname of the gold-plated statuettes that winners in each category take home.

Cedric Gibbons, the art director of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is credited with designing the iconic statue ahead of the first annual awards banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (aka “the Academy”) in 1929.

He dreamed up the knight (possibly modeled on a Mexican actor of the era) standing on a reel of film, holding a crusader’s sword to defend the industry from outside criticism. And Los Angeles-based sculptor George Stanley made the statuette a reality, one that stands 13 1/2 inches tall and weighs 8 1/2 pounds.

Its full legal name is the “Academy Award of Merit.” The Academy officially adopted its nickname, Oscar, in 1939.

But where did it come from?

Bruce Davis got that question all the time — in letters and emails from the curious public — during his two-decade tenure as the Academy’s executive director, which ended in 2011.

“And what astonished me was that when I would ask around the building, everybody would say, ‘Well, we don’t exactly know,’” he told NPR. “And so I didn’t do anything about it myself until I was retiring.”

Davis decided to use his newfound free time to compile a history of the institution, ultimately publishing The Academy and the Award in 2022. One of the questions it explores is the origin of the Oscar nickname.

“As it turned out, that was not an easy thing to find out,” Davis said. “It took a lot of running around and doing some actual research, and I did finally come up with something that I’m reasonably confident is the right answer.”

There are three enduring — and competing — myths about where the name came from. Davis debunked them all and proposed a fourth.

Workers set up an Oscar statue in the red carpet area before the 2025 Oscar awards.

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The debunked claims 

“Oscar” made its first mainstream newspaper appearance as shorthand for an Academy Award in March 1934, when entertainment journalist Sidney Skolsky used it in his Hollywood gossip column.

Davis recounts the apocryphal legend this way: Skolsky was running up against deadline on his awards-night rough draft when he was stopped by the word “statuette.”

“He thought it sounded awfully snobby and he didn’t know how to spell it,” he said. “And he asked a couple of people around in the hall, and I guess no one was helping him spell statuette.”

Skolsky later said he thought back to a vaudeville routine where the master of ceremonies would tease an orchestra member by asking, “Oscar, will you have a cigar?” And he claimed he decided to poke fun at the ceremony’s pretentiousness by referring to the statuettes as Oscars instead.

Davis sees a few holes in this story, namely that the term appeared in at least one industry publication months before Skolsky’s column. But it’s not a total loss for Skolsky, who is separately credited with coining or at least popularizing the term “beefcake.”

Bette Davis and her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr., pictured in Hollywood in 1940. She claimed in her autobiography that she jokingly named the statuette after him, but later admitted she hadn’t coined the term.

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The most famous version of events involves none other than legendary actress Bette Davis. She had long claimed, including in her 1962 biography, that she coined the Oscar’s nickname while accepting her first Academy Award some three decades earlier.

“Her story was that she was holding [it] in her hands and just kind of waiting for the ceremonies to move along, and she started looking at the hindquarters of the statuette and she said … the hindquarters of the statuette were the very image of her husband,” Davis explained.

But Davis’ husband at the time, musician Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr., was primarily known by another nickname, “Ham.” And mentions of “Oscar” appeared in print years before Davis won her first one, in 1936. Davis eventually retracted the claim in her 1974 book, telling her biographer: “A sillier controversy never existed.”

“I don’t feel my fame and fortune came from naming Oscar ‘Oscar,’” she said, according to USA Today. “I relinquish once and for all any claim.”

The more-likely suspects

Perhaps a more likely source is Margaret Herrick, the Academy’s mid-20th century librarian-turned-executive director.

She apparently referred to the statue as such in the 1930s “because it looked like her uncle Oscar,” said Monica Sandler, a film and media historian at Ball State University.

Sandler says Herrick is the most logical choice, given her proximity to the Academy.

Herrick joined her then-husband, executive director Donald Gledhill, at the Academy in the early 1930s as an unpaid volunteer, and became its official librarian in 1936. Herrick took over as interim executive director when he left for the Army in 1943.

She was formally appointed to the role two years later and led the Academy until her retirement in 1971.

“There are very few women with the type of power and control she had over an institution at that time in the industry,” Sandler said.

Margaret Herrick, the executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, pictured with film pioneer Col. William Selig in 1947. She also took credit for coining the nickname, apparently after her uncle.

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Herrick is credited with building up the Academy’s library into one of the world’s primary film research centers, as well as negotiating the award show’s first television contract — and a major step toward financial independence — in 1953.

Davis says she often took credit, in conversations and media interviews, for jokingly naming the Oscar after her uncle. But he’s skeptical of Herrick’s claim.

“We’re not sure that she was really the first person to use that, because she had difficulties over the ensuing years in identifying this Uncle Oscar,” he explained.

Davis does, however, think that the most likely originator was someone else on the early staff of the Academy: Eleanore Lilleberg, a secretary and office assistant who apparently oversaw the pre-ceremony handling of the statuettes.

He said her name surfaced every now and then, but he didn’t have “much hard proof” until after his retirement, when he got wind of the Einar Lilleberg Museum. It’s a small community center in California’s Green Valley honoring Eleanore’s brother, Einar Lilleberg, an artist and craftsman. He booked a visit and immediately happened upon a box of Einar’s writings.

“And I thought: ‘This is it. Now, this is going to tell the story about the Oscar,’” Davis says. “And he almost did.”

He said Einar’s correspondence was light on detail, but unmistakably credited the naming to his sister, describing it as: “Yes, she got in the habit of doing that, and the rest of the staff thought it was amusing not to call them the ‘Academy Award of Merit,’ but just ‘Oscar’ … and it really did catch on.”

So which Oscar did Lilleberg have in mind? Her brother’s explanation, which Davis endorses, is that she was thinking back to a Norwegian veteran they had known as children in Chicago, who “was kind of a character in town and famous for standing straight and tall.”

Davis wasn’t able to track down that particular Oscar. But he says no one has challenged his theory in the years since his book was published, “so I’m sticking with it.”

The lingering mystery 

The Oscar statuettes were called “Academy Awards of Merit” at the first ceremony in 1929. Their nickname officially took hold a decade later.

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While Davis takes some personal satisfaction in the outcome of his quest, he accepts that the mystery of the Oscar nickname may never be solved conclusively.

“If I had come up empty, I wouldn’t be arguing that we need to change the name,” he said. “But it’s interesting that it became such a tradition. There were no film awards that had a personal name before Oscar gained his, and then … within the next couple of years … everybody started looking for a personal name.”

Sandler, the media historian, says that because the Academy Awards were “really the first major pop culture award,” many others used it as a template.

The prizes in other countries’ most-prestigious award ceremonies have similarly personified names: France’s César Awards, Mexico’s Ariel Awards, Italy’s David’s. Plus, there are the Emmy and Tony awards, both products of the mid-20th century.

Davis says he’s just satisfied that people are still interested in the Oscars, regardless of who they’re named after.

“You feel closer to an award if you’re on a first-name basis with it, I guess,” he added.