Why are the Academy Awards called the Oscars? 3 possibilities for mysterious nickname
That little gold man bestowed as filmmaking's highest honor at the Academy Awards has a name. It's Oscar.
Yes, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the governing body for the glitzy annual awards, officially calls him the Academy Award of Merit. But the familiar gold-plated statue of a sword-holding knight is universally referred to as the Oscar.
The catchy nickname has been around so long that even Oscarologists are unsure how − or even when − Oscar was coined. Even longtime former Academy executive director Bruce Davis threw his hands up after exhaustively tracking down the Oscar's origin in his 2022 tome, "The Academy and the Award."
"Bruce Davis definitely traced all the rumors, the half-truths and the partial truths," says film historian Leonard Maltin. "Yet even a scholar who ran the Academy for years couldn't definitively determine the true story of who named Oscar. And it ain't going to suddenly appear now."
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How did the Oscar award come about?
The trophy's origins are clear. MGM art director Cedric Gibbons sketched the figure of an impressively ripped knight as an art crusader for the first Academy Awards in 1929. (The design wasn't based on a human model.) The Academy didn't adopt the nickname until 1939, and the nickname's origins "aren't clear," according to the organization's official history. The Academy trademarked the name "Oscar" (and "Academy Awards") in 1979, solidifying ownership of the term.
How did Bette Davis get involved in Oscar naming?
There are three legitimate claimants to naming the Oscar, including one of the most famous actresses in Hollywood history. Bette Davis claimed in her 1962 autobiography, "The Lonely Life," that she recognized the backside of the "Hollywood male" when accepting her best actress award in 1936 for "Dangerous." That peachy gold rump could only belong to her then-husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr.
"I stared at the little gold-plated man in the palm of my hand," Davis wrote. "In a kind of madness, his backview was the spit of my husband's ... Oscar it has been ever since."
Because the term had appeared in newspapers years before Davis took the Oscar stage, the star eventually pulled out of naming contention. Davis told her biographer Whitney Stine in "Mother Goddam" (1974): "A sillier controversy never existed. I don’t feel my fame and fortune came from naming Oscar ‘Oscar.’ I relinquish once and for all any claim."
Hollywood gossip columnist swears he named Oscar on deadline
During the sixth awards presentation in 1934, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, a contemporary of famed Hollywood scribes like Hedda Hopper, used the name in his column in reference to Katharine Hepburn’s first best actress win for "Morning Glory."
In his 1975 memoir, "Don't Get Me Wrong − I Love Hollywood," Skolsky fiercely maintained anointing Oscar and ridiculed all other challengers. Skolsky wrote that the name appeared when he was stumped spelling "statuette" on deadline. The transplanted New Yorker recalled vaudeville comedy shows where Oscar was the go-to name for the butt of jokes. The easily spelled name would also puncture the award's "phony dignity."
"The audience laughed at Oscar. I started hitting the keys," Skolsky wrote. "During the next year of columns, whenever referring to the Academy Awards, I used the word 'Oscar.' In a few years, Oscar was the accepted name."
Bruce Davis (who is not related to Bette) and other historians take issue with Skolsky's account because the term Oscar appeared in an entertainment column for the defunct Los Angeles Post-Record dated Dec. 5, 1933. This was six weeks before Skolsky's alleged inspiration. Like other claims, Skolsky's "buckles under scrutiny," Davis writes.
The third Oscar possibility: An inside job with Margaret Herrick
A popular story has been that Academy librarian Margaret Herrick thought the gold award resembled her dear Uncle Oscar, so the Academy staff began referring to it as Oscar. A significant problem with the account is that no dear Uncle Oscar existed. "Mrs. Herrick was never able to produce an uncle with that name," Davis writes.
After researching 1948's "International Motion Picture Almanac," film historian Terry Ramsaye cited the inspiration as Herrick's mother's cousin, a Texas wheat farmer named Oscar Pierce. "I've yet to see a photograph of Uncle Oscar Pierce," Skolsky sniped in his memoir.
In Maltin's view, Herrick, who served as the Academy's executive director from 1945 to 1971, has the most plausible case despite the flaws.
"But I take perverse pleasure knowing that in a town built on hyperbole and rumor, there is no conclusive answer as to who named the famed Oscar," Maltin says.