Agence France Presse

Hollywood

The venerable Oscar is the child of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was created in 1927 to promote films. The academy began with 36 members with actor Douglas Fairbanks as its first president. The Academy created the golden trophy to honour performances by the industry’s leading actors, actresses and directors, eventually expanding to evolving categories not even envisioned in the Hollywood of 1927.

An art director from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, Cedric Gibbons, was selected to design the statuette — the figure of a knight standing on a reel of film, hands gripping a sword. The Academy’s world-renowned statuette was born.

The first Academy Awards, a simple and brief dinner banquet, held on May 16, 1929 at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, just a few meters from the Oscars’ new home, the Kodak Theatre.

Since the first awards ceremony, around 2,500 of the trophies have been handed out in an awards ceremony that has become bigger, glitzier and more glamorous over the years, with the exception of wartime shows.

The early editions of the statues were bronze, but during the World War II’s metals shortage, the trophies were made of plaster. Those were later redeemed for the now gold-plated ones.

The trophy, standing 13.5 inches tall and weighing 3.85 kilos, wasn’t always called an Oscar, but his form has not changed since his birth, except when his pedestal was raised in 1945.

The origin of the statuette’s name is unclear. One legend has it that Academy librarian and eventual executive director Margaret Herrick thought it resembled her Uncle Oscar and said so. Her staff began referring to it as Oscar.

Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky used the name in a 1934 column in referring to Katharine Hepburn’s first best actress win. The Academy itself did not use the nickname officially until 1939.

At the first awards ceremony, which lasted just 15 minutes, there were only 15 statues handed out. On this Sunday, 50 Oscars will be handed out in 24 categories as the fields of achievement expanded into areas such as special effects and best animated film.

Carried initially by radio, the Oscars were first televised in 1953 in black and white, making the jump to colour in 1966. This year, the ceremony will also be carried on the Internet.

The highly anticipated invitation-only awards ceremony, which is watched worldwide, goes on no matter what, though on rare occasion the broadcast has been delayed.

Ceremonies were delayed in 1938 because of heavy flooding, in 1968 after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and in 1981 after assassination attempt on one-time actor and then president Ronald Reagan.

But just four days after the US-led war in Iraq erupted last year, the 75th anniversary edition of the show went ahead as scheduled, with only one nod to the circumstances — a reduced red carpet show.

Oscar has moved frequently over three-quarters of a century, shifting his awards from hotels to venues such as the Dorothy Chandler Music Pavilion and the Shrine auditorium, that is until 2002.

The Academy then moved the biggest awards show of the year into the new custom-built Kodak Theatre, which seats 3,300 people in a state-of-the-art auditorium.