So, Once And For All (We Hope), Bruce Davis Settles Why They Call It ‘Oscar’
26.06.2022 - 20:23
/ deadline.com
If you happen to care about the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (at least in its first fifty years), you’ll have no shortage of reasons to read Bruce Davis’ forthcoming book, The Academy and the Award.
The boardroom fights—Davis, the Academy’s former executive director, got access to the secret files. The real story of the Bette Davis presidency (weirdly, less stormy than the famous drama queen made it out to be). And those footnotes! In a note to Chapter 15, Davis describes running to the ground an old canard that had legions of ancient residents at the Motion Picture Home holding sway over Academy Awards voting. With the help of Price Waterhouse and his own membership department, he found that fewer than a half-dozen members were getting their mail at the home, and three of those hadn’t voted for at least five years.
I love details. Davis has them.
But the best part, for me, is a 20-page examination of a matter that has never been adequately explained. That is, why does the Academy call its film awards the Oscars?
You may think you know the answer. But according to Davis, you probably don’t.
As he tells it, beginning on Page 216 of galleys thoughtfully provided by the Brandeis University Press, there have been three principal claimants to credit for naming what is now universally known as the Oscar statuette.
One was the aforementioned Bette Davis, who, in her 1962 book The Lonely Life, told of having been inspired in 1936, while accepting her little gold man for Dangerous, with the thought that: “his backview was the spit of my husband’s. Since the ‘O’ in Harmon O. Nelson stood for Oscar, Oscar it has been ever since.”
The story collapsed when it became clear that the term by then had been in use