The Oscar statuette awarded to Jiří Menzel’s 1966 film Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky). The Czech film won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 40th Academy Awards in 1968.
8 March 2023
The annual awards of the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science are popularly dubbed the Oscars. How the name became associated with the awards is unknown, but there are many competing claims for its coinage. The awards were first presented in 1929, and Oscar became associated with them in the early 1930s.
Brazilian film scholar Waldemar Dalenogare Neto uncovered the earliest known use of Oscar in reference to the awards in a newspaper column by Relman Morin that appeared in the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record of 5 December 1933:
What's happened to the annual Academy banquet?
As a rule, the banquet and the awarding of "Oscar," the bronze statuette given for best performances, is all over long before this.
But so far, not even a mention of the affair.
Ten days later, a second use of the name appeared in the Seattle Star:
Cause of Worry
Away from here it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but Hollywood is very much interested in what has become of the annual dinner and “award” of the Academy. Its full title is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and each year it has been holding a dinner and presenting bronze [sic] statuette to the actor or actress voted as having turned in the best role for the season. Last year it went to Helen Hayes.
It should have been over long before this, but to date “Oscar,” which is the players’ pet name for the statue, is without an owner. It is whispered that the vote gave it to one of the 40-odd actors who withdrew from the academy last spring to join an actor group affiliated with the A.F.L.
Prior to the discovery of these 1933 uses, the earliest known use of Oscar as a name for the Academy Award was in a New York Daily News column by Sidney Skolsky bearing a dateline of 16 March 1934. The column uses Oscar several times:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made its annual awards for the outstanding achievements in the motion picture field at their banquet in the Ambassador Hotel this evening.
These awards mean to Hollywood what the Pulitzer prize means to dramatists and novelists. It is the picture people’s main incentive to strive for “artistic achievement” in an industry where their worth is judged by box office figures.
At tonight’s banquet the winners, while movieland looked on and applauded, were presented with bronze statues. To the profession these statues are called Oscars.
[…]
The Oscar for the best production of the year went to Fox for “Cavalcade.” This picture, which rated four stars in The News, was awarded the prize in competition with such four-star specials as “Little Women,” Smilin’ Thru” and “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”
[…]
Laughton, who started as a kitchen clerk in the Claridge Hotel in London, also was not present to receive his little Oscar. This actor at present is touring the provinces of England in Shakespearean plays at a $100-per-week salary. He always wanted to prove he could act.
The Oscar for the best direction went to Frank Lloyd for “Cavalcade.”
Saral [sic] Y. Mason and Victor Heerman will take turns on the Oscar for their adaptation on “Little Women.” And the award for the best original story of the year went to Robert Lord for “One Way Passage.”
Skolsky would mention Oscar again in his column the next day:
The Academy Awards met with the approval of Hollywood, there being practically no dissension…The Academy went out of its way to make the results honest and announced that balloting would continue until 8:00 o’clock of the banquet evening…Then many players arrived late and demanded the right to vote…So voting continued until 10:00 o’clock or for two hours after the ballot boxes were supposed to be closed…It was King Vidor who said: “This year the election is on the level”…Which caused every one [sic] to comment about the other years…Although Katherine Hepburn wasn’t present to receive her Oscar, her constant companion and the gal she resides with in Hollywood, Laura Harding, was there to hear Hepburn get a round of applause for a change…The number of votes actually cast for these highly-touted prizes are kept a secret, but if you must know there were only about eight hundred votes cast.
Despite the fact that his original column referred to Oscar as an already existing industry term, Skolsky would later claim that he coined the name for this column in an attempt to deflate some of the hype and puffery surrounding the awards. He said the inspiration came from an old vaudeville bit where a comedian onstage would kid the orchestra leader with the question, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?” But given the earlier citations of its use, he clearly was not the originator of the name. (Trivia: the original Oscar in the vaudeville bit was Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of the playwright/lyricist, who in addition to being a composer and theater impresario, also owned a cigar factory.)
In a 1972 book, screenwriter Frances Marion recalled that Walt Disney referred to the award he won at the same 1934 ceremony that Skolsky attended as Oscar. He may have, but Disney won many Oscars, and nearly forty years after the fact Marion could very well have misremembered the date.
As to the term’s coinage, the Academy itself is non-committal, but seems to favor one of its own as the coiner. Academy press statements often credit the coinage to Margaret Herrick, née Gledhill, who started working as the Academy’s librarian in 1931 and would rise to become its executive secretary. Supposedly, on her first day of work she saw one of the statuettes and declared that it looked like her Uncle Oscar. While the tale is plausible, there is no evidence to support Herrick’s coinage.
Bette Davis is often credited with the coinage because at the 1936 ceremony she referred to her award as Oscar. According to Davis, the statue’s backside reminded her of her then husband Harmon Oscar Nelson. But clearly the name was already in well established by this date.
Others credit John LeRoy Johnston, a Hollywood photographer and public relations director with the coinage. Again, there is no direct evidence for this claim. In his blog post on the possible origins of Oscar, Peter Jensen Brown suggests that the inspiration may have been Oscar Smith, a Black actor and Hollywood boot black who was well-known to the Hollywood elites. While it’s nice to think that he would be so honored in an era when Black contributions to Hollywood were often overlooked, there’s no reason to think that is actually the case. Lots of people associated with films of the era were named Oscar, and there needs to be evidence to connect any individual Oscar with the award before such a claim can be considered.
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that the name Oscar comes not from the artistic side of Hollywood, but rather from the technical one. Among acoustical engineers of the era, oscar was jargon for oscillation. The term appears in glossaries as early as 1929 and specifically in one in the 1931 Motion Picture Almanac. Furthermore, the Academy’s first Scientific and Technical Awards were presented in 1931 and several of the early awards went to advancements in sound engineering. And in making the transition from oscillation to statuette, in the early 1930s, Bell Labs developed a wax manikin for calibration and equalization of binaural audio signals—just as humans have two ears, one on each side of the head, the manikin had microphones in place of ears. The engineers at Bell Labs named the manikin Oscar. A description appears in the April 1932 issue of Popular Science:
A wax dummy serves as critic during the orchestra rehearsals of Leopold Stokowski, famous conductor. Named “Oscar,” it sits through a performance at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with an impassive expression on its molded face. But its ears never miss a note, for they are twin microphones connected to an amplifying system and earphones. By listening in, engineers can determine the best arrangement of the orchestra for radio broadcasting purposes.
It is highly probable that Hollywood sound engineers were aware of the manikin and the work at Bell Labs, and perhaps it was some anonymous sound engineer who dubbed the statuette Oscar. And we have another award name that followed a similar path. The name Emmy, the name of the award given for similar awards in television, comes from industry slang Immy, short for image orthicon, a type of vacuum tube used in early television production. While the evidence for this hypothesis is circumstantial, it is more substantial than the evidence for any of the other explanations.
Sources:
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. “History of the Scientific and Technical Awards.” Oscars.org.
Brown, Peter Jensen. “Envelope Please—Unwrapping Oscar’s Origin Stories.” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 22 February 2019.
Dalenogare Neto, Waldemar. “Descoberta: primeira menção ao nome Oscar na imprensa.” Criticas de Filmes (blog), June 2021. (In Portugeuse).
Holden, Anthony. Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards. Toronto: Viking, 1993, 84. Archive.org.
“Hollywood from the Inside.” Seattle Star, 15 December 1933, 16/2. Newspapers.com.
Lawson, James Eric. “Re: [ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 26 February 2023.
Morin, Relman. “Cinematters.” Evening Post-Record (Los Angeles), 5 December 1933, 4/2. Newspapers.com. [The database’s metadata has this appearing on page 2.]
The Motion Picture Almanac. New York: Quigley, 1931, 94. Archive.org.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2004, s.v. Oscar, n.3.
Paul, Stephan. “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Develpments." Acta Acustica, 95, September 2009, 767–88 at 769–70. ResearchGate.
Popik, Barry. “Oscar (Academy Award).” Barrypopik.com, 23 December 2007.
Popular Science, April 1932, 48. Google Books.
Sands, Pierre Norman. A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927–1947). PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1966. New York: Arno Press, 1973, 91n. Archive.org.
Scheuer, Philip K. “Talkies Give New Tongue.” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1929, 26/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Shapiro, Fred. “[ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 25 February 2023.
Skolsky, Sidney. “Films Crown Hepburn, Laughton Year’s Best.” Daily News (New York), 17 March 1934, Brooklyn Final Edition, 3/2, 23/2. Newspapers.com. [Note: Not all editions of the paper carry the column.]
———. “Hollywood” (18 March 1934). Daily News (New York), 19 March 1934, 32/3. Newspapers.com
Photo credit: Martin Vorel, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.