Was the Oscar statue designed and named after ancient Egyptian gods?

On Sunday evening, for the 96th time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out statuettes for the Academy Awards, which many have referred to since the early 1930s, and which the Academy itself has described since 1939, as the “Oscars.”

The Academy has long maintained that these gleaming gold statues – now the most prestigious awards in the world, even more prestigious than the Nobel or Pulitzer Prizes – depict a knight standing upright and holding a cruciform sword in his right hand over his left (in order to defend the film industry), Beneath it is a film reel with five rods (representing the original branches of the organization, producers, actors, directors, writers and technicians).

Meanwhile, the title “Oscar” is variously attributed, without convincing evidence, to the Academy’s first executive director. Margaret Herrick (which she supposedly said reminded her of her uncle named Oscar), the actress Bette Davis (Which she claimed looked like her husband Harmon Oscar Nelson) and columnist Sidney Skolsky (Who was the first to refer to the printed statuette as “Oscar” because, as he later wrote, he had grown tired of writing “golden statuette” and thought it would refer to an old theatrical joke in which a comedian asks an orchestra conductor, “Do you have a cigar, Oscar?”) .

For nearly a century, these explanations have been largely accepted and repeated. But a few weeks ago, after my brother, who was honeymooning in Egypt, sent me photos of ancient sculptures that closely resembled Oscar, I ventured down a deep rabbit hole — from reading minutes of early academy meetings to consulting with Egyptologists at Ivy League universities — and we found To believe that the true story of the statue’s design and name may have been completely different.

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The academy, officially founded in 1927, was the brainchild of MGM’s president Louis B. Mayer. The main motivation for its creation was to promote “harmony” in the industry in order to avoid a union of artists and craftsmen, and the idea of ​​introducing “awards of merit for distinguished achievements” – “medals, trophies, or any form of prize”. “It may be decided” – seemed from the beginning an effective means of achieving this goal.

In addition to Mayer, one of the organization’s 36 founders was MGM’s supervising artistic director Cedric Gibbonsan American of Irish descent, worked at this studio since its founding in 1924, and remained there until 1956. As a former executive director of the Academy Bruce Davis Notes its excellent 2022 date Academy and awardIt was Gibby who, just two weeks after the founding of the Academy, when he was only 37 years old, was given the task of creating a “seal, emblem or badge” for it. He eventually came up with a diagram of what is essentially the Academy Award as we know it now, only in 2D. When he was later asked to design the award that the Academy would give out each year for cinematic achievement, he came back with a sketch of a 3D version that was approved by the board.

Gibbons then hired – for just $500 – a 26-year-old Los Angeles sculptor, George Stanley, to achieve his design. The statuette was completed in 1928; The copies were cast in bronze by a “skilled craftsman.” Guido Nelly At the California Bronze Art Foundry, then gold plated; Dozens of them were presented at the first Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929, with Mayer and Stanley in attendance. (Gibbons was unable to achieve this.)

What the academy has never acknowledged — or apparently until anyone else except a few Egypt-focused bloggers has noticed — is that Gibbons’ statue, from which the current model has deviated very little, looks eerily like ancient statues of Ptah, the ancient Egyptian . The god of – wait for it – arts, crafts and commerce. (The Academy declined to comment for this story.)

Indeed, for thousands of years, Ptah has been depicted – often in gold – as an elegant figure, standing upright (perhaps mummified, but for his arms and face) and holding in front of him, right hand over left, a staff. . (“I wonder if he was influenced by Egypt, because it is very similar to the god Ptah,” the artist said Caron Davis I recently thought to Hollywood Reporter When sharing a re-imagined figurine alongside other artists in an issue of Oscar Magazine.)

Gibbons, like everyone else involved in creating the Academy and designing its award, is long dead (he died in 1960), so it is probably impossible, at this point, to get a definitive answer about what influenced his design of the statue. But, in terms of circumstantial evidence, it seems certain that he was acquainted with Ptah.

Gibbons was and remains closely associated with the Art Deco movement that exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when America was suffering from the Great Depression, but he was drawn to opulence. He was introduced to the style on a 1925 trip to the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industrielles Modernes in Paris, and appears to have been greatly fascinated by it. He soon thereafter designed in this style the house in which he lived with his first wife, a silent-era movie star Dolores del Rio, and regularly hosted Hollywood’s A-list parties (construction began in 1929). Over the next several decades, he designed, or at least supervised the design of, countless MGM sets in this style, from the 1932 lobby Grand Hotel To the Emerald City in 1939 Wizard of Oz To fantasy settings Busby BerkeleyVariety musicals of the 1930s.

Art Deco, with its geometric shapes and elegant surfaces, dates back directly to ancient Egypt. In fact, the label only appeared in the 1960s. In the 1920s and 1930s, when Gibbons was helping popularize this style, many referred to it as the “Nile Style.”

This craze dates back to 1922, when a British archaeologist discovered it Howard Carter Discovery of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt King Tutankhamun, also known as “King Tut,” ruled from approximately 1332 BC, when he was nine years old, until his death in 1323 BC, when he was 19 years old. Unlike the tombs of most other ancient pharaohs, which were raided by grave robbers, King Tutankhamun’s tomb was found intact and filled with more than 5,000 artifacts that were surveyed and cataloged over the next decade. King Tut’s tomb and its contents – including the statues of Ptah – are arguably the most important archaeological find ever, garnering global media attention and sparking a wave of ancient Egyptian-inspired jewellery; art; and architecture, including New York’s Chrysler Building (construction began in 1928), the Empire State Building (1930), Rockefeller Center (1930) and Radio City Music Hall (1931). (The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood was already under construction before the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and opened in the same year.)

Gibbons, when commissioned by the Academy to create a statuette to celebrate artistic achievements, decided to design it in this style, and it is very likely that he thought of other artefacts of this type – which brings us back to Ptah. For centuries BC, Egyptians, especially in the ancient capital of Memphis, regarded Ptah as the “creator god,” the god of artists and craftsmen. So, for a designer looking to create a figurine that celebrates artists and craftsmen, there is no more appropriate model.

But what does all this have to do with the name “Oscar”? Over the centuries, images of Ptah were combined with those of two other ancient gods, Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Soker, the god of the afterlife, giving rise to a “funeral deity” known as Ptah-Soker-Osiris, symbolizing life. And death and resurrection. Sokar alone is very similar to Oscar, as is the amalgamation of the names Osiris and Sokar. Again, this is just speculation, but Gibbons — or someone else who recognized the similarity between Ptah and the Oscar statue — may have come up with such a moniker. Such a path is no less acceptable to me than that claimed by Herrick, Davis, or Skolsky.

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Gibbons has given relatively few interviews and, as far as I can tell, has never spoken in depth about the inspiration behind his most famous creation, the Oscar. (In poetic terms, he was nominated 37 times, winning 11, although he said, “I have never won an Oscar. I deserve it or the Oscar I won.”) But today, if you visit Egyptian cities including That’s Memphis and Luxor. Or museums around the world that display Egyptian art, and keep your eyes open, you will still see many ancient sculptures and statues that look very similar to Oscar.