Lifestyle
And the Oscar goes to — wait, why is it called an Oscar?
An Oscar statue appears outside the Dolby Theatre ahead of the 2015 ceremony. But who is he really?
Matt Sayles/Invision/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Matt Sayles/Invision/AP
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.
Jae C. Hong/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Jae C. Hong/AP
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.
General Photographic Agency/Hulton Archive
hide caption
toggle caption
General Photographic Agency/Hulton Archive
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.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
hide caption
toggle caption
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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.
Dean Treml/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Dean Treml/AFP via Getty Images
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.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
NPR
This week’s challenge
Today’s puzzle is a tribute to Mimi. Every answer is a familiar two word phrase or name in which each word starts with the letters MI-.
Ex. Assignment for soldiers –> MILITARY MISSION
1. Pageant title for a contestant from Detroit
2. One of the Twin Cities
3. Nickname for the river through New Orleans
4. Super short skirt
5. Neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains Museum Row
6. Just over four times the distance from the earth to the moon
7. Goateed sing-along conductor of old TV
8. American financier who pioneered so-called “junk bonds”
9. Little accident
10. Land-based weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal
11. In “Snow White,” the evil queen’s words before “on the wall”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?
Answer
Notre Dame –> Renovated
Winner
Chee Sing Lee of Bangor, Maine
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from James Ellison, of Jefferson City, Mo. Think of a popular movie of the past decade. Change the last letter in its title. The result will suggest a lawsuit between two politicians of the late 20th century — one Republican and one Democrat. What’s the movie and who are the people?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 23 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
A landmark is a landmark because it tells you that you’re home now — the piece of earth you’ve chosen to inhabit saying, “You’ve made it back, congratulations.” We identify our cities with their landmarks, and because we identify with our cities, we identify with the landmarks too. They are us and we are them, mirroring each other through eternity. A city like New York or Chicago, with the Chrysler Building, the Bean, etc., has landmarks that exist in the world’s popular consciousness. But L.A.’s most cherished landmarks belong to us and us alone, a secret you’re let in on if you live here long enough and pay attention.
The Fashion Nova baddie in horizontal sprawl off the Vertigo, for example, is an emblem for those in the know. Our twisted version of a capitalist guardian angel, patron saint of spandex in a cropped matching set. Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Fashion Nova. Merging on the 110 South from the 10 East while the sunset burns and traffic thickens is a miracle in more ways than one, and in the spirit of compulsively performing the sign of the cross when you pass a church on the freeway, this billboard is deserving of its own acknowledgment.
It may not be the landmark L.A. asked for, but in Sayre Gomez’s painting “Vertigo,” you begin to understand why it’s the one we deserve. At the opening for “Precious Moments,” Gomez’s solo show at David Kordansky, the room was vibrating. A game of energetic ping-pong unfolded underneath the gallery’s fluorescent light, beams of identification, recollections or stabs of grief bouncing off each piece in the exhibition. People were seeing hyperspecific parts of a city they love reflected in a hyperspecific way — for better and for worse. Recognition has two edges and they both happen to be sharp. Gomez twists the knife deeper for a good cause: He wants you not just to look but to really see.
In his work exist iconic signs of beloved local establishments — like the Playpen — the blinding glint reflecting off downtown’s skyline, telephone poles regarded as totems. The line to see Gomez’s replica of L.A.’s graffiti towers, “Oceanwide Plaza,” snaked through the gallery’s courtyard. Once inside, at least three graffiti writers whose names were blasted on the replica pointed it out proudly, even gave out stickers to take home. The truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly — in this case it’s both — on the flip side showing up in the form of smog, tattered flags and an abandoned graffiti tower that starkly represents the pitfalls of capitalism and greed, a neon arrow pointing to the homelessness crisis.
Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave.
— Sayre Gomez
In the main gallery, I was stuck on “Vertigo.” On the 12-foot canvas, my eye went to the place out of focus: the thin strip of billboard in the background featuring a young woman with sand-dune hips, patent knee-high boots and long black hair laid up on her side, wearing cat ears and a tiger bodysuit as flush as second skin. The model made the kind of eye contact that felt dangerous — might cause an accident if you’re not careful. “#1 Halloween Destination … FASHION NOVA,” it read. I knew her, anyone who has driven through the two main arteries of Los Angeles knows her. The black-and-white smiley motif of the Vertigo, an events space, sat right next to her face, just happy to be there, it seemed, above a painted sign that says “Ready to Party?”
The sky was the color of cotton candy, but the stale kind that’s been hardening in a plastic bag for days after the fair. Something rancid about it. In the foreground of the painting was a car encampment with a tattered floral sheet woven through the windows, cloth tarps and couch cushions creating a shield against the elements. Small plastic children’s toys lined at the top of the car — dinosaurs and dump trucks and sharks — creating their own shrunken skyline in front of the Vertigo, signaling that young kids likely lived there. It’s less juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an accurate reflection of the breakneck duality of living in a place like L.A.
Even angels exist within the context of their environments. Our Fashion Nova baddie hangs off the Vertigo, a building that has used its ad space as physical clickbait and political posturing for over a decade. It’s promoting the kind of fast fashion brand that’s been regarded as a case study on the industry’s environmental impact. In the years the billboard has been up, it’s looked over dozens and dozens of car encampments like the one depicted in Gomez’s piece.
She feels dubious, yes. But no less like ours.
Julissa James: I’ve lived in L.A. for 13 years now. For me, the city and the architecture of the city is less the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Frank Gehrys — there’s that — but other landmarks that signal, “Oh, I’m home.” The Fashion Nova baddie above the Vertigo has always been that for me. Your piece is layered and there’s so much more to it than just that, but that’s the first thing I saw and was like, “Whoa. I need to talk to Sayre. We need to talk about ‘Vertigo.’”
Sayre Gomez: It’s like L.A.’s Statue of Liberty. It’s the city of anti-landmarks, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s the Hollywood sign, which I think is so telling, because it’s the remnants of a real estate venture. The city is built by real estate schemes and 100 years later we’re feeling the effects of it. You’ve got empty skyscrapers and a massive homeless catastrophe. L.A. doesn’t really have real landmarks. It has anti-landmarks.
JJ: When did the Fashion Nova billboard above the Vertigo click for you as something that felt representative of the city, or something that you wanted to depict?
SG: My studio is in Boyle Heights, so I pass that billboard multiple times a week. This is my 20th year in L.A. and that building’s always been a big mystery to me. It was empty when I moved here before this guy Shawn Farr bought it and turned it into Casa Vertigo. I think he probably makes more money on it with the ad space than anything. I know nobody who has ever been there. Very mysterious to me. So that’s what I was drawn to.
(Paul Salveson from David Kordansky Gallery)
The Vertigo has always been mysterious to me. And that whole fashion industry is mysterious to me — the kind of shmatta, American Apparel-adjacent, or maybe coming out of the wake of that. These kinds of businesses, or the representations of these businesses, how do they function and how do they flourish? Is it aboveboard? What more perfectly encapsulates that than that building? It’s this weird thing you can’t quite figure out but somehow it has a lot of money and then it’s an event space, supposedly billed as that. Clearly it’s this big ad thing, and I’m very interested in the changing dynamics of capital. The capital of yesteryear, which was based on the brick and mortar, where things are being made in a specific location, maybe on an assembly line or in a specific way, to a kind of capital that is based solely on advertising or on viewership. These beautiful buildings acting as pedestals for some kind of ad space, you know? It becomes an anti-landmark for me. Something where I’m like, “Oh, there’s that thing again.”
JJ: It’s this gorgeous Beaux Arts building …
SG: It’s a Freemason building!
JJ: When I’ve talked to some people about the Vertigo, they’re like, “the Fashion Nova building?”
SG: They always have the woman in the same pose — same pose, different clothes. If you remember before Fashion Nova, they would have these provocative ad campaigns or provocative slogans. “Twerk Miley” was up, remember that? They did a Trump one: “TRUMP NOW.” They did one for Kanye when he ran for president. The 10 and the 110 are literally the crossroads of the city, so it’s really poised to be a special building. It has a special designation because of the location.
JJ: Talk to me about the process of doing this piece. Where did it start and how did it evolve?
SG: I was cruising around that vicinity trying to see if I could get a good vantage point to take photos of Vertigo. And then I stumbled upon this car — the car that’s in the foreground of the painting. Anytime I see an encampment that has kids’ toys, things that reference back to the lives of children, it hits hard. But I like to lay it all out there. I like to make things confrontational. I want it to be difficult. The painting isn’t based on a one-to-one photo [Gomez paints from a composite rendering of images he’s taken around town], but I knew that I wanted to use that car, and I knew I wanted to get the Vertigo building, and so I started just messing around with different iterations. I could never find a good angle to take a good photo of the building, so I just went on Vertigo’s website and I was like, “I’m just using these.” I switched the sky and put a more moody, atmospheric sky in.
JJ: Which I loved, because we know that feeling — you’re merging onto the 110 and you see a beautiful sunset. The euphoria of like, “L.A. is the best city in the world.” But you know what? What I found so interesting about your piece is that it was revealing to me about myself, but also about so many of us that live in L.A. and have lived here for years and have developed a jadedness. When I saw your piece, immediately I was like, “Oh my God, the Vertigo! The Vertigo! The Vertigo!” And then I was like, “OK, wait, hold on, there’s so much more going on here.” But the fact that my eye went to that first instead of the car encampment, the kids’ toys, brought up a lot of questions about my own relationship to the city and the things that we choose to see, the things that maybe we’ve seen so much of that we subconsciously filter it out. Why was it important for you to put these two things up against each other in this way?
SG: Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave. That’s what I’m doing in my work at large. I use the sunsets and the beauty to create a dialogue, to entice people to sort of look a little bit at how things are contextualized, how things act, what’s actually happening. I don’t make things in a vacuum. I was working on this show and I was going to really push this agenda of incorporating more of my experience with my kids into the work. That’s also a double-edged sword. I wanted to interject some levity, because the work can get so dark. I wanted to bring in some iconography from their world and things that they get excited about. When you’re juxtaposing that with really stark things, it becomes darker. I want to thicken the stock a little bit. Make things a little more complex.
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and guest scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Phil Pritchard and panelists Alonzo Bodden, Adam Burke, and Dulcé Sloan. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
The Don Vs The Poppa; World’s Worst Doctor; Should We Eat That?
Panel Questions
Big Cheese News!
Bluff The Listener
Our panelists tell three stories about someone missing a huge opportunity in the news, only one of which is true.
Not My Job: Phil Pritchard, the NHL’s Keeper of the Stanley Cup, answers three questions about the other NHL, National Historic Landmarks
Peter talks to Phil Pritchard, the NHL’s Keeper of the Stanley Cup. Phil plays our game called, “Let’s Go Visit The NHL” Three questions about National Historic Landmarks.
Panel Questions
The Trump Dump and Air Traffic Control Becomes Animal Control
Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Spice Up Your Spring Cleaning; A Fizzy Meaty Drink; The Right Way to Eat Peeps.
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict the next big AirBnB story in the news
-
Culture8 minutes agoFamous Authors’ Less Famous Books
-
Lifestyle13 minutes agoSunday Puzzle: For Mimi
-
Technology26 minutes agoThe future of local TV news has taken a Trumpian turn
-
World32 minutes agoPope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump: report
-
Politics38 minutes agoTrump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
-
Health44 minutes agoLoneliness may be silently eroding your memory, new research reveals
-
Sports50 minutes agoESPN’s Stephen A Smith hears boos from WrestleMania 42 crowd
-
Technology56 minutes agoChinese robot breaks human world record in Beijing half-marathon