The 98th Academy Awards are going to be held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood in a few days, and several Irish people have been nominated for an Oscar. The smart money is on Best Actress for Killarney-born actress Jessie Buckley, recognized for her role in Hamnet, a story that looks at the tragic inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamnet also got a nomination for Coleraine-born author Maggie O’Farrell alongside director Chloé Zhao for Best Adapted Screenplay of O’Farrell’s novel, while Ireland-produced comedy-drama Blue Moon has been nominated in the Original Screenplay category; it was made in association with Dublin-based Wild Atlantic Pictures.
Dark sci-fi comedy Bugonia, which was produced by Dublin-based Element Pictures, has several nominations too including Best Picture, the latter of which means Irish producers Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe are in the hunt for the famous golden statue.
In the technical categories, Dubliner Richard Baneham is among the team nominees for Visual Effects for his work on Avatar: Fire and Ash. He’s looking for a hat-trick, as he has already won for Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water. Finally, in the Animated Short Film category, Retirement directed by Dublin-based filmmaker John Kelly and voiced by Domhnall Gleeson has been nominated.
Whether any of them win or not, the Irish have always been front and center at every single ceremony, because that very famous statue was designed by an Irishman named Cedric Gibbons.
An art director and designer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for 32years, he designed over 2,000 films and was himself a winner of no less than 11 Oscars and dozens of nominations (still the record in that category).
The story behind the statue begins shortly after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) came into being in 1927.
A picture in the Los Angeles Times on May 5 showed Cedric alongside Louis B. Mayer, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and others, all of whom were determined to honor outstanding achievements in the industry, and encourage higher levels of quality throughout the business.
A lavish dinner was held in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to discuss the goals of the new organization, and legend says that over coffee and cigars, Gibbons sketched the now-legendary figure of a knight gripping a sword and standing in front of a reel of film as a potential design for their awards-to-be.
The five spokes of the reel stood for the original branches of the Academy – actors, directors, producers, technicians and writers – and the sword symbolized protection for the welfare and advancement of the industry.
Whether it really was sketched late-night on a hotel napkin or not, the design was immediately adopted by the Board of Directors, and in early 1928 Gibbons chose local sculptor George Stanley to realize his design for what was called the “Award of Merit”.
Amazingly, no live models or sketches were used, and Stanley worked up several versions of the statue before Gibbons selected one: the final version had more of a streamlined knight, and at the time the film reel moved beneath its feet.
The very first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929, in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and was very much an insider’s banquet – the 15 winners were known in advance, it wasn’t broadcast on television or radio, and was over in less than half an hour.
Despite many sources saying Gibbons was born in Dublin, the official records show that he was in fact born in Brooklyn, New York, though he was certainly of Irish heritage. His grandparents were Irish, and as the eldest of three children of a first-generation immigrant (his father, Patrick), Cedric always referred to himself as Irish.
It's hard to imagine now, but as a major tastemaker in the “Golden Age of Hollywood”, Gibbons was almost as well known as some actors and directors. When movies were still largely black and white, he told journalists he used colors in set design purely to invoke the right atmosphere and inspire the actors.
He also spoke about the intricacies of using light and shade, and how his movie sets were “modified impressionism” – something that represents realism, but is of course manufactured.
In the Los Angeles Times in 1923, he also weighed in on design in the home, the headline reading that “ugly furniture breaks up marriages,” and Gibbons then suggesting that it wasn’t moving pictures or flapper culture that was the problem with society – it was the parlor furniture!
His proclamations might seem dated today, and surely many even then disagreed with his love of lemon-colored bathroom walls, but House and Garden, Harper’s Bazaar and even Vogueasked for his opinions, and his influence and the “MGM Style” went far beyond the studio gates.
Later, when “talking pictures” were shaking up the industry, he wrote about the subject for the Los Angeles Times, insisting that what audiences saw was as important as what they heard.
Since Gibbons scribbled that first design, more than 3,000 statuettes have been presented. Hand-cast in bronze, they receive a 24-karat gold finish, stand 13½ inches tall and weigh 8½ pounds (many people are surprised at how heavy they are).
The design of the statuette has been modified little, though for a time they were made of Britannia metal, a pewter-like alloy, and during the time of shortages in WWII, they were painted plaster (though winners could exchange them for gold ones when hostilities ended). The size of the base has varied though, until the present standard was adopted in 1945.
As for the nickname “Oscar”, the origins of it are rather a mystery. One story says that the then-Academy librarian thought it resembled her Uncle Oscar, and staff began using the name, but it wasn’t until the sixth ceremony in 1934 that it was first used in the press, and not officially by the Academy until 1939.
The next year, 1940, Gibbons won his third “Oscar”, this time for Pride and Prejudice, and his other memorable wins include Gaslight (1944), The Yearling (1948), Little Women (1949), An American in Paris (1951) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
Just as astounding are a small sample of some of the other movies he worked on: Seven Brides of Seven Brothers, Singin’ in the Rain, On the Town, Anchors Aweigh, National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz. It’s a credit list many could only dream of.
Gibbons was married three times, including to Mexican actress Dolores del Rio, the first Latin American crossover star in Hollywood, and who was seen as the female version of Rudolph Valentino.
They were married in Santa Barbara, California, in August 1930,and were an “it” couple of Hollywood in the decade they were married. They organized lunch Sunday lunch parties at their home in Pacific Palisades, and celebrities like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Cary Grant would be there playing tennis, or lounging by the swimming pool.
Today you can see a display of Oscar statuettes throughout the decades at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, and though Gibbons, who died in 1960, might be somewhat forgotten now, his works lives on in the movies he designed – and in his most famous creation, a golden statuette that millions wish they could win…
By James Bartlett
