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The biggest night in film is almost here. The hotly anticipated Academy Awards will descend on Los Angeles on Sunday (15 March), with celebrities arriving on the red carpet, after-parties lined up, and social media ready to tune in for 'Oscars snubbing' season again.
Whether you're team Marty Supreme, Sinners or Hamnet for Best Picture, one question seems to crop up every year: why is the Academy Awards ceremony called the Oscars?
Technically speaking, the famous eight-and-a-half-pound gold statuette is officially known as the Academy Award of Merit. Yet the line everyone knows is: And the Oscar goes to…
Strangely enough, no one knows for certain how the nickname began – though several theories have persisted over the years.
One of the most frequently cited explanations, according to the Academy, points to former Academy librarian Margaret Herrick (and eventual executive director), who worked there during the 1930s and 40s.
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The story goes that when she first saw the golden statuette, she remarked that it resembled her Uncle Oscar. From then on, Academy staff supposedly began referring to the award simply as Oscar.
However, some historians believe there’s a more convincing explanation. Another widely discussed theory credits Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, who attended the awards in 1934.
Skolsky wrote about Katharine Hepburn’s first Best Actress win in one of his columns. According to Foster Hirsch, author of Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, Skolsky found the ceremony somewhat overindulgent.
"He thought that the ceremonies were pompous and self-important and he wanted to deflate them in his column," Hirsch suggested. Skolsky reportedly began referring to the statuette as Oscar, possibly a nod to theatre owner Oscar Hammerstein.
"So it was actually a sort of disrespectful or even snide attribution," Hirsch added about the nickname. "It was meant to deflate the pomposity of the Academy Award of Merit".
The Academy Awards 2026 will be held at the Dolby Theatre in LA on 15 March, and will be broadcast live on ABC and streamed on Hulu.
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