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.
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."
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.
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
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.
