What is 'Oscar', the Academy Award statuette, made from, and how tall is he?

zbeckabee

The official name of the Oscar statuette is the Academy Award of Merit. Made of gold-plated britannium on a black marble base, it is 13.5 inches (34 cm) tall, weighs 8.5 lb (3.85 kg) and depicts a knight holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes, signifying the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers and Technicians. [4]. MGM’s art director Cedric Gibbons, one of the original Academy members, supervised the design of the award trophy[5] by printing the design on scroll. Then sculptor George Stanley sculpted Gibbons' design in clay, and Alex Smith cast the statue in tin and copper and then gold-plated it over a composition of 92.5 percent tin and 7.5 percent copper (Levy 2003). The only addition to the Oscar since it was created is a minor streamlining of the base (Levy 2003). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Awards#The_Oscar Jul 23 06, 8:22 AM