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.

In a Burbank writers’ room, over deli sandwiches from down the street, someone asked, “What’s your one dating deal-breaker?” I didn’t hesitate. “He can’t have a cat.” A few eyebrows lifted. That’s the hill? I doubled down. I hate them. I’m scared of them. Instant swipe left.

Two years later, I met my Bumble date at a North Hollywood bar shaped like a whiskey barrel, and my heart dropped the moment I saw him. He was even more handsome than his profile suggested. Disarmingly real-life handsome. I scanned the room to make sure it wasn’t a prank, which had actually happened to a coworker, but the coast seemed clear.

We sipped Moscow mules and traded stories like we had known each other for longer than an hour. When a surprising burlesque performance erupted beside us, he didn’t so much as glance away. His eyes stayed on mine. The night felt magical.

I don’t usually romanticize first dates. Most of them make it easy. A quick drink, polite conversation, a mutual understanding that we tried. It’s simpler than confronting the parts of myself I’ve hidden for years, fearing no one would accept me. I perfected the art of staying just far enough away to never fully be seen.

Until now. This one felt different.

As I headed home, the hum of Lankershim and the neon blur of bars couldn’t drown out the quiet, unmistakable voice inside me whispering, “I think I just met my future husband.”

My phone buzzed.

“Have I mentioned I have a little black void named Aneksi?”

A black cat with enormous green eyes stared back at me. Oh no … no, no, no! How could my dream guy, my supposed future husband, have my biggest deal-breaker?

This couldn’t be happening.

Despite my cat trepidation, I saw him again, just to make sure my first-date magic wasn’t a fluke. But the second date was even better. Shoot.

Over the next few days, I did what any rational woman falling for a man with a cat she despised would do. I Googled how long cats live. Fifteen years. Sometimes 20. Could I outlast it? Could I ask my dream guy to give up his rescue cat, his pandemic buddy? No. That would be cruel. Or would it?

Cats weren’t something I could easily get used to. My whole life, they had been vilified by my mom’s side of the family. We half-joked that our family had a curse with cats. Maybe this alleged “curse” is why I fear cats, or maybe it’s because when I was 4 years old I was attacked by one.

It happened at a sleepover. My friend’s cat hid under the bed and wanted us to play with it, so I leaned over and uttered three words I’ll never, ever, say again: “Here, kitty kitty.”

The cat lunged, claws digging into my arms. I ran for the door. Jammed. I tried barricading myself in the closet. The feisty cat was faster. My screams finally drew my friend’s mom to intervene. I limped home looking like a scene out of “Carrie.” The family curse was alive and well.

Now I was standing at the intersection of fear and desire. And I couldn’t stop liking him.

For most of our early relationship, Aneksi hid. I rarely stayed the night, secretly loving the eight-minute buffer between his Valley Village place and mine in Sherman Oaks. The perfect distance physically … and emotionally.

I hadn’t been in love in more than a decade. I carried shame about parts of my body that I preferred no one examine too closely. I had an MBA in becoming invisible. And yet, despite the moat around my heart, I couldn’t deny I wanted love again.

Aneksi, it turned out, had his own trust issues. Once he realized I wasn’t leaving, he cautiously emerged from his hiding spot, keeping an arm’s length between us. Fine by me. My dream guy occasionally nudged me to pet him or offer a treat. I did, briefly, because it mattered to him. What unsettled me more than the cat was this man’s patience. His steadiness. The way he cared without asking for anything back.

And then he left town.

He asked if I could watch Aneksi. The first day, the cat stayed hidden. I fed him, cleaned the litter box and left. By day three, curiosity won. He poked his head out. I placed a treat on the cat tower. He accepted. I pet him for approximately 2½ seconds. He seemed to enjoy it. I seemed to enjoy it. Huh? By the end of the week, I was sending photo updates like a proud babysitter, documenting every cautious inch of progress.

Over the next year, Aneksi no longer bolted when I entered the room. Sometimes, though, I still wanted to. That was when my dream guy, known as Sergio, brought up living together. Every cell in my body screamed yes, but my mind spiraled. The litter box. The tuna. The early mornings. No more eight-minute buffer to retreat to.

Plus, the idea of one of us giving up our rent-controlled apartment felt like throwing a pot of gold into the Pacific. What if it didn’t work out? And yet, my growing love for him tipped the balance. OK, I thought, let’s give this a real try.

Cohabitation wasn’t seamless. The litter box was still disgusting. The tuna still smelled. We coexisted more than we bonded. I loved Sergio. I tolerated the cat.

Then I hurt my knee at a dance audition in Pasadena I had no business attending.

When I started limping, Aneksi exuded a sympathy limp. The vet confirmed nothing was wrong with him. As I lay on the living room floor in pain, he flopped beside me and blinked slowly. I instinctively blinked back as happy tears streamed down my cheek. For the first time, his presence didn’t heighten my nervous system. He steadied it.

Something shifted after that. The safer he felt, the more open I became.

Sergio knew about my insecurities. What he didn’t always see was how carefully I managed myself around them. Like the angles I chose in photos, the way I shrunk myself to go unnoticed, the relief of a closed door. Living together made hiding harder.

One night, with Aneksi wedged between us on the couch, I let him see the parts of me that still wanted to hide. He didn’t flinch. He stayed.

For someone who spent years outrunning love, I was surprised to learn that when I stopped spiraling in my mind, I could finally trust what my body already knew.

I’m now married to Sergio. The spare rent-controlled apartment is gone. The litter box remains. And Aneksi rarely leaves my side. I now have two loves of my life and I couldn’t imagine it any other way. Maybe the family curse was never about cats. Maybe it was about fear. And maybe, finally, it’s broken.

The author is a screenwriter whose upcoming Hallmark movie “A Season to Blossom” premieres April 4. Find her on Instagram: @itsjenwolf.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Editor’s note: On April 3, L.A. Affairs Live, our new storytelling competition show, will feature real dating stories from people living in the Greater Los Angeles area. Tickets for our first event are on sale now at the Next Fun Thing.

Smiljan Radić Clarke was named the newest Pritzker Prize-winner — an award often called the Nobel of architecture — Thursday morning.

Was he surprised by his win?

“Yes, completely,” the Chilean architect told NPR in an email. “[It’s] a huge honor. And possibly, in the very near future, a bit of a headache, since it will probably mean being far more exposed than I would like.”

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Smiljan Radić Clarke

Tom Welsh for The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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The designer, known professionally as Smiljan Radić, is not exactly underexposed. But he is not as well known internationally as earlier Pritzker winners, such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. Radić, who is 60 and the second Chilean architect to win the award, has designed dozens of buildings that have earned him a formidable reputation in artistic and intellectual circles. The New York Times described him as “a rock star among architects” in 2014, after his contribution to London’s prestigious Serpentine Pavilion.

For that annual installation that showcases cutting-edge architects, Radić designed a glowing rotund pod, almost alien in appearance, perched upon weathered quarry stones. Architecture critics were captivated.

“Seeming to belong at once to a world of science fiction and to a primordial past, the pavilion could well serve as the film set for a post-apocalyptic drama,” wrote Ellis Woodman in his review for The Telegraph. “And yet… it also invites association with the use of ruins and grottoes in the eighteenth century English landscape garden…. What is most captivating about Radić’s heroically peculiar pavilion is the way that it seems to stand out of time.”

Radić grew up in an immigrant family in Santiago. His father’s parents came from Croatia, and his mother’s from the United Kingdom. Although he colloquially uses his father’s surname, he told Pritzker officials upon winning the prize that he wanted to honor his mother by including her last name in the official announcement.

As a student, Radić nearly failed out of the architecture program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Later, he described the humiliating experience as formative, enabling him to travel and study history. While in college, he met sculptor Marcela Correa, who became his wife and close collaborator. Among the numerous works they’ve created together is the celebrated House for the Poem of the Right Angle, a secluded house in the woods of Vilches, Chile, completed in 2013.

Exterior and interior views of House for the Poem of the Right Angle, 2013, Vilches, Chile

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Cristobal Palma; Gonzalo Puga/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

A dramatic mishmash of stark angles and sinuous bulges, the black concrete structure was inspired by an abstract painting by Le Corbusier. The interior is open and airy, encased in cedar and stone.

“House for the Poem of the Right Angle signifies contemplative retreat,” the Pritzker committee wrote. “with thoughtfully placed openings, oriented upward to capture light and time, encouraging stillness and introspection.”

NAVE, Performing Arts Center, 2015, Santiago, Chile

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Radić’s other notable works include several performing arts spaces in Chile, including the NAVE arts hall in Santiago and Teatro Regional del Bío Bío in Concepción, which earned him accolades and awards. The Pritzker jury called the theater “a carefully engineered semi-translucent envelope [that] modulates light and supports acoustic performance through restraint. Construction becomes a kind of storytelling, where texture and mass carry as much meaning as form.”

Vik Millahue Winery, 2013, Millahue, Chile

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The view from inside the Vik Millahue Winery, 2013, Millahue, Chile

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From certain angles, his VIK winery in Millahue, Chile looks like a giant piece of agricultural equipment. It was, Radić said, intended to reflect the realities of winemaking, rather than a romance with the fermented grape. During an onstage lecture for the Architecture Foundation in 2023, Radić credited industrial process and chemistry as inspiration. “It’s not really about some concept I don’t like, the idea of terroir,” he said. “It’s a lot of myth.”

In recent years, Radić has also collaborated closely with the high fashion brand Alexander McQueen, designing stores in Miami, Las Vegas, London and Dubai. Yet the Pritzker jury noted that his buildings “invite interpretation, rather than consumption.”

This year’s jury was chaired by Alejandro Aravena, who became the first Chilean to win the Pritzker in 2016. His admiration for his countryman was evident in a Pritzker statement.

“In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious,” he wrote of Radić. “He reverts back to the most irreducible basic foundations of architecture, exploring at the same time, limits that have not yet been touched. Developed in a context of unforgiving circumstances, from the edge of the world, with a practice of just a few collaborators, he is capable of bringing us to the innermost core of the built environment and the human condition.”

In February, the Pritzker Prize itself came under scrutiny when it became public that Tom Pritzker, the director of the foundation that awards the prize, had been in frequent communication with Jeffrey Epstein. Tom Pritzker is the son of Jay A. Pritzker, who established the prize with his wife Cindy in 1979. (The elder Pritzker died in 1999.)

The family had made a fortune in the hotel industry. Tom Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, though he remains the chairman of The Hyatt Foundation. A spokesperson for the Pritzker Prize told the New York Times that the Hyatt Foundation protected the prize from outside influence and its financial support enabled the jury “to remain assured in the strength of its process and focus entirely on the celebration of architectural excellence.”

The prize bestows $100,000 on the winner, as well as a bronze medallion.

“This sad moment in history is not the best circumstance in which to receive an award,” Radić told NPR in an email. He was responding to a question about the importance of architecture during a moment when so many important buildings are being destroyed around the world in conflicts and wars.

“The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra once wrote in the 1940s that ‘the sky is falling apart,’ and today we might add that the earth itself seems to be cracking,” he wrote. “Still, I believe that architecture is a positive act — it helps create concrete realities where people can value their surroundings in a different way.”