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Actor Gig Young shows off his Oscar for best-supporting actor shortly after his win at the Academy Awards show in 1970. He won the honor for his role as a sleazy emcee in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), a grim drama about a 1930s dance marathon, which starred Jane Fonda, also nominated that year for her role. Young, who was born and raised in St. Cloud as Byron Barr, had a successful career in the movies until his decline from chronic alcoholism. In 1978, he killed his wife of three weeks, then shot himself to death in their Manhattan apartment.
Oscar from front page bert during the 1935 ceremony. Augustin gave his talk Feb.
11 because the 86th annual Oscar show is about to be broadcast March 2 from Los Angeles. Along with the Super Bowl, the Oscar telecast has long been the most widely watched annual program in television history.
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When he was young, growing up in New Ulm, Augustin loved movie-going and relished watching the Oscars, although one night he was sent to bed and had to listen to most of the program on the living-room TV while crouched in the dark at the top of the stairs. The first Academy Awards broadcast was in 1955 when On the Waterfront garnered the Oscar for best picture, with best actor and actress awards going to Marlo Brandon in Waterfront and Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. That ceremony, Augustin said, resulted in one of the biggest “upsets” in Oscar history. Judy Garland was widely considered certain to win best actress for her stunning performance in A Star is Born. During the telecast, Garland was in the hospital, recovering from the birth of her third child. Camera set-ups were all over her hospital room, preparing for the big moment when Garland would give a live telecast acceptance speech from her bed. When the presenter opened the envelope and said, “The winner is Grace Kelly,” many people were left speechless with disbelief, including Garland.
“Oscar”a
In 1927, famed movie studio mogul Louis B. Mayer gathered together some movie people and decided to initiate a recognition award to honor excellence in film. Cedric Gibbons, an art director at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, sketched out his idea on a napkin during a banquet of what an award should look like, and Mayer agreed. The design was of a stylized man with a rather flattened head, holding a long
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sword vertically, its point resting on a film can under his feet. A Los Angeles sculptor, George Stanley, then morphed that sketch into three dimensions and Oscar was born, although it wasn’t called Oscar until the 1935 ceremony. For the first six years, the statuette was called the “Academy Award of Merit.” No one is sure as to how the statue came by its name, but the most famous claim is by actress Bette Davis, who said the statuette’s rear-end reminded her of her first husband, band leader Harmon Oscar Nelson. The first statuettes were made of 90 percent tin and 10 percent pewter. During World War II, they were made of plaster. Later and now, they are made of brittanium covered with highly polished coats of silver, copper and gold. The base is black-coated bronze. Each stands 13.5 inches tall and weighs 8.5 pounds.
Augustin’s “Oscars”
For his presentation, Augustin brought two of his own “Oscars.” They are actually replicas he bought on ebay. One, made of plastic, was used in a Henry Fonda movie, whose name Augustin could not remember. The other, a gold-painted plaster one, was used in another movie, but Augustin is not sure which one it was.
Voting
To determine nominations, votes are cast within each category only by those who are members of that category (i.e. actors vote for actors, art directors vote for art directors, and so forth). For the final vote, all members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can vote for all the categories. There are currently about 6,000 members of the Academy.
First ceremony
The first Oscar ceremony took place in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It was strictly a movie-world gathering with no hoopla or press attention from the rest of the world. All of the nominees were silent films as the “talkies” had not yet made their big splash. The first movie to win an
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Friday, Feb. 21, 2014 Academy Award was Wings, a movie about ace pilots in World War I that contains what many still consider to be the greatest aviation footage ever filmed. The first acting honors went to Emil Jannings for two performances – The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh; and to Janet Gaynor for three movies – Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise. The latter film, a dark and moody love story directed by F.W. Murnau, is to this day widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. Winner Jannings, disillusioned with Hollywood, returned to his home country, Germany, where Hitler’s regime, impressed by Jannings talent, put him to work starring in anti-Jewish war-propaganda films, even though he himself had some Jewish blood in his veins. After the war, nearly charged as a war criminal, he was forbidden to work anymore in movies. He carried his Oscar around with him, to show it to the Allied soldiers and to prove he once lived in Hollywood as a good American and outstanding actor. He died in 1950 in Austria. His Oscar is now on display at a Berlin film museum.
Oscar moments
Augustin shared with his audience some of his Oscar stories: Hattie McDaniel In 1940, Hattie McDaniel won the best-supporting actress award for her role as the family slave, Mammy, in the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind. She was the first black performer to win an Oscar. During the ceremony, she had to sit way in the back of the ballroom, away from the other nominees toward the front of the room. Adding insult to injury, her speech was written for her by the movie’s studio officials because they wanted her to say only what they wanted her to say. Sidney Poitier The first black man to win Best Actor was Sidney Poitier for the 1963 movie, Lilies of the Field. Ann Bancroft, who had won the previous year for The Miracle Worker, presented the Oscar to Poitier on the stage,
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