why do they call it the oscars

They’re called “the Oscars” because the official “Academy Award of Merit” statuette picked up the casual nickname “Oscar” in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the name stuck so hard that the Academy itself adopted it in 1939.

The official name vs. the nickname

• Officially, the trophy is the Academy Award of Merit , created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

• “Oscar” started as an informal nickname for the gold knight statue and gradually became the everyday name for both the trophy and the ceremony.

• Over time, headlines, studios, and audiences liked the shorter, punchier word “Oscar” more than the formal title, especially as the awards became global pop culture events.

The main origin stories

No one origin story is 100% proven, but these are the big contenders people still talk about.

1. Margaret Herrick’s “Uncle Oscar”
   • Margaret Herrick, an early Academy librarian (later its executive director), supposedly saw the statuette and said it looked like her Uncle Oscar.

 * Staff started using “Oscar” as a joke, and the nickname spread through the industry.

2. Columnist Sidney Skolsky’s deadline trick
   • Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky wrote one of the first public uses of “Oscar” in a 1934 column about the awards.

 * He later claimed he made up “Oscar” to avoid the word “statuette,” which he thought sounded stiff and pretentious, and may have borrowed it from a vaudeville gag line (“Oscar, will you have a cigar?”).

3. Bette Davis’ husband
   • Actress Bette Davis later said she thought the statuette’s back looked like her husband Harmon Oscar Nelson’s backside, and that she started calling it “Oscar” because of that.

 * This story is famous but not well documented, and many historians are skeptical.

4. The Norwegian “Oscar” theory
   • More recent research points to an Academy secretary, Eleanore Lilleberg, who may have nicknamed the statue after a tall, upright Norwegian army veteran she knew named Oscar.

 * Her brother’s autobiography claims she called the statues “Oscar” for that reason, but this theory is still debated.

Quick mini-timeline

1. Late 1920s: Statue designed and the awards begin, formally called the Academy Awards / Academy Award of Merit.

2. Early 1930s: “Oscar” starts being used informally inside Hollywood.

3. 1934: “Oscar” appears in print in a widely read Hollywood column.

4. 1939: The Academy officially adopts “Oscar” as the trophy’s nickname.

Why the nickname won

• “Oscar” is short, distinctive, and easy to use in headlines, radio, and TV, unlike the clunky phrase “Academy Award of Merit.”

• Fans, journalists, and studios quickly embraced the nickname because it sounded more human and less formal, which fit Hollywood’s storytelling image.

• Today, “the Oscars” is basically a brand in itself, even though legally the award is still the Academy Award of Merit.

How people talk about it online

Across forums and Q&A sites, you’ll often see people simplify it like this:

• The event : the Academy Awards (or “the Oscars” in casual speech).

• The statue : the Oscar.

• The short answer most users give: “Oscar is just the nickname that stuck; no one knows for sure who said it first.”

In other words, the mystery is part of the charm: what started as an inside joke or offhand comment turned into one of the most recognizable award names in the world.

TL;DR: The Academy’s gold statue is formally the “Academy Award of Merit,” but a catchy nickname, “Oscar,” emerged in the 1930s—likely from an offhand remark or a columnist’s joke—and it became so popular that the Academy officially embraced it in 1939.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.