The 95th edition of the Academy Awards was held recently in Los Angles, California. The world-famous event saw the utterly unique comedy drama Everything Everywhere All at Once receive multiple accolades and seven awards, including those for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Actress. Defying genres, the film combines multiple worlds, time travel and superheroes.
Each winner was given one of the world-famous engraved awards to take home, a golden statue that stands 13.5 inches in height and weighs 8.5 pounds. It was designed by Cedric Gibbons, Art Director at MGM, while the statue was sculpted by L.A artist George Stanley, who realised the concept in three dimensions. As a result, the statuette featuring a knight bearing a crusader’s sword and standing astride a reel of film became the iconic trophy that is still bestowed upon winners to this day.
Over 3,000 of the awards have been presented to date, with each made by the Polich Tallix foundry based in New York. The design of the Academy Award has changed little from its original design save for some differences in the base size.
While officially it is called the Academy Award of Merit, Oscar is the statuette’s nickname. While it is used far more commonly, there is no record of its exact origin. However, a popular tale suggests that an Academy librarian who eventually became an executive director called Margaret Herrick commented when seeing the award for the first time that it looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.