Last night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held their annual awards ceremony in Los Angeles, CA. If you want to dominate your office’s water cooler talk, drop some of these cool Oscar facts on your co-workers.

The show’s official name is “The Academy Awards” but most people know it by its more familiar name, “The Oscars,” the nickname of the statuette itself. There are quite a few stories about where the name came from, but The Academy only supports one. The official version is that an Academy librarian in the 1930s claimed that the statuette looked like her Uncle Oscar and it simply stuck. Oscar is supposed to represent a crusader knight holding a sword and he stands on a five-spoked film reel representing the five branches of the Academy — actors, writers, directors, producers and technicians.

An Oscar weighs in at 8.5 pounds and stands tall at 13.5 inches. The first Oscars were bronze, but they quickly switched to britannium, a leadless pewter. This metal alloy is then coated in copper, nickel, silver and then a “top-coat” of 24-carat gold. During World War II Oscar was made of plaster because of metal shortages but the winners were allowed to exchange these for the real deal after the war ended. The rising cost of gold has also increased the price for each Oscar. Each statuette costs about $500 to produce, up from $400 in 2007, according to Oscar’s Chicago-based manufacturer R. S. Owens.

Beginning in the 1950s, all nominees were required to sign documents pledging to not sell the Oscar and in 1955, serial numbers were added. The statuettes are sent to the Academy’s Beverly Hills office in unmarked crates to prevent any shenanigans, but in 2000, 55 Oscars were stolen creating a worst-case-scenario for the Academy. They were located and returned in the nick of time, but the robbery forced R.S. Owens to begin working a year ahead of schedule to prevent any future disasters.

Your homework for today:
How the Oscars Work
How Movie Projectors Work
What do movie ratings mean, and who applies them?