General News
Oscar And Ellen Star In The Academy’s 2014 Poster – Here We Go!
©A.M.P.A.S.®
What a picture of the Oscar guy and host Ellen DeGeneres on the first official poster for the 86 Academy Awards! She looks great!!
Next Thursday morning, January 16th, the nominations will be announced LIVE and as in years past, WAMG will be reporting from inside the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. (8:30 a.m. ET / 5:30 a.m. PT)
Achievements in up to 24 regular categories will be honored on March 2, 2014, at the 86th Academy Awards presentation at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center. However, the Academy won’t know how many statuettes it will actually hand out until the envelopes are opened on Oscar Night.
Have you caught the snappy Oscar trailer starring Ellen rockin’ the tux? I can’t wait to see her opening monologue.
Although the number of categories will be known prior to the ceremony, the possibility of ties and of multiple recipients sharing the prize in some categories makes the exact number of Oscar statuettes to be presented unpredictable. As in previous years, any surplus awards will be housed in the Academy’s vault until next year’s event.
Speaking of the Golden Guy, MGM art director Cedric Gibbons designed the statuette and Los Angeles sculptor George Stanley was selected to bring to three-dimensional form the figure of a knight standing on a reel of film, hands gripping a sword. The Academy’s world-renowned statuette was born.
credit: ABC/Andrew Eccles
Since the initial awards banquet on May 16, 1929, in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, 2,900 statuettes have been presented. Each January, additional new golden statuettes are cast, molded, polished and buffed by R.S. Owens & Company, the Chicago-based awards specialty company retained by the Academy since 1982.
The statuette stands 131/2 inches tall and weighs a robust 81/2 pounds. The design of the statuette has never changed from its original conception, but the size of the base varied until the present standard was adopted in 1945. Officially named the Academy Award® of Merit, the statuette is better known by its nickname, Oscar, the origins of which aren’t clear.
A popular story has been that Academy librarian and eventual executive director Margaret Herrick thought it resembled her Uncle Oscar and said so, and that the Academy staff began referring to it as Oscar.
In any case, by the sixth Awards presentation in 1934, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky used the name in his column in reference to Katharine Hepburn’s first Best Actress win. The Academy itself didn’t use the nickname officially until 1939.
It stands today, as it has since 1929, without peer, on the mantels of the greatest filmmakers in history.
credit: ABC/Andrew Eccles
The accounting firm of Price Waterhouse signed with the Academy in 1934 and has been employed ever since to tabulate and ensure the secrecy of the results. The ballots for the 86th Awards will be tabulated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the name adopted by the firm in 1998. This is the second year the Academy will provide its membership the option to vote either online or by paper ballot.
When the first Academy Awards were handed out on May 16, 1929, at an Academy banquet in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, movies had just begun to talk. The attendance was 270 and guest tickets cost $5. It was a long banquet, filled with speeches, but presentation of the statuettes was handled expeditiously by Academy President Douglas Fairbanks.
The suspense that now touches most of the world at Oscar time was not always a characteristic of the Awards presentation.
That first year, the award recipients were announced to the public three months ahead of the ceremony. For the next decade, the results were given in advance to newspapers for publication at 11 p.m. on the night of the Awards.
But in 1940, much to the Academy’s dismay, the Los Angeles Times broke the embargo and announced the winning achievements in its evening edition, which was readily available to guests arriving for the event. As a result, the Academy adopted the sealed-envelope system the next year, and the system remains in use today.
Keep up-to-date on all things Oscar by following our fellow Movie Geeks at the Academy (Yep, they are!)
http://www.oscars.org/herewego
https://twitter.com/TheAcademy
http://instagram.com/theacademy
https://www.facebook.com/TheAcademy
©A.M.P.A.S.®
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