The most popular theory is that the nickname for the Academy Award is coined to the Academy Award librarian and future Director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick.
History dictates that when Herrick first saw the statuette in 1931, he said he looked like his uncle Oscar.
According to Emanuel Levy, author of the book All about Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards , columnist Sidney Skolsky was there when he said it and would later write that “the employees had affectionately nicknamed the famous statuette as Oscar.”
Skolsky says he named him
Although the first use of the name Oscar was documented by Skolsky in a 1934 New York Daily article , there is no evidence that the columnist is actually responsible for the above quotation.
In his 1975 memoirs, Don´t Get Me Wrong, I Love Hollywood , Skolsky tired of writing for everything «the golden statue of the Academy», decided to use the name in reference to a line of a classic vaudeville joke –– a kind of light comedy that developed in France from the 18th century ––, would you give me a cigar, Oscar ?, in an attempt to make fun of how pretentious the Academy Awards were when humanizing the statuette.
An article in TIME magazine seems to support the claim, stating:
«THIS WEEK SIDNEY SKOLSKY JOINED THE GROWING GANG OF WRITERS THAT GEORGE BACKER PUBLISHING IS ASSEMBLING FOR THE NEW YORK POST. HOLLYWOOD THOUGHT THAT BACKER HAD CHOSEN CORRECTLY, SINCE SKOLSKY IS ONE OF THE MOST APT COLUMNISTS IN THE BUSINESS AND BY FAR THE MOST POPULAR »
Although Skolsky actually has evidence to support his claim, the idea or term he coined remains in doubt.
The first to call him Oscar in public
Some people say that during the acceptance speech of the Walt Disney Prize for The Three Little Pigs in 1934, Disney referred to the statuette as the Oscar, which was supposedly already a well established nickname within the industry.
Perhaps Margaret Herrick, for some strange reason, did think that the statuette looked like her uncle; Or maybe Skolsky actually did invent the nickname (whether he did it or not, it helped popularize the term).
The only certainty is that nobody knows exactly why Oscar is called the statuette, or the Academy itself .
However, Herrick’s story is the one that has always transcended .