Ireland has no nominees at the Oscars on March 21st, but before we make history by becoming the first TV audience to boycott the event, we should remember that this country will always take centre stage at the Academy Awards.
Oscar is Irish - or at least his father, Cedric Gibbons, winner of eleven academy awards, was. Born to Austin Gibbons and his wife Veronica, in Dublin, on March 23rd, 1893, Austin Cedric seemed destined to join his father's architecture practice in the US. When his maths proved not to be up to scratch, he turned instead to painting and sculpture, gaining a place at New York City's Art Students' League. After graduation, Cedric, as he was by then known, found work with the nearby Edison Studios, were his potential was quickly recognised by Sam Goldwyn, who offered him a better job.
During contract talks, Gibbons shrewdly insisted on sole credit as art director on all future US films from the company, and this clause was kept when he joined Metro Goldwyn Mayer as supervisory art director, guaranteeing that his 1,500 credits are a movie-makers' record to this day.
Award for excellence
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was inaugurated on May 4th, 1925, its original members, including Cecil B. De Mille, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Raoul Walsh, Louis B. Mayer and Gibbons, were determined to win recognition for their work. An award for excellence was suggested, and Gibbons, probably the only art director to attend the Paris Exposition of 1925, set about designing it.
His drawings (made on a table-cloth at a movie industry banquet) were passed on to George Stanley, who sculpted the original for $500 - one thousandth of the sum raised by Sothebys for Vivien Leigh's Oscar from Gone With The Wind in 1993.
Gibbons's statuette was dubbed the "Iron Man", until, according to one Hollywood legend, the Academy's librarian, Margaret Herrick, saw it and exclaimed: "Why, it looks just like my Uncle Oscar!" Oscar's sleek, androgynous appearance wasn't appreciated by all recipients, however, and left Clark Gable, for one, highly unimpressed. In 1931, Gibbons received the first of his 37 award nominations for several early films, including Our Dancing Daughters, starring Joan Crawford, which, as the first movie with an art deco set, caused a sensation. People sought out venetian blinds, art deco figurines and indirect lighting for their own homes.
Although virtually all of his Oscars were presented to Cedric Gibbons as team leader, such collaboration in no way devalues his achievements. MGM, Warner Bros and Universal all had several films in production simultaneously, so delegation was a necessity. As supervisory art director on almost every bigbudget MGM film between 1925 and 1956, Gibbons was ultimately responsible for all visual effects.
Yet, ironically, his most famous work went officially unrecognised. When nominated for art direction for The Wizard of Oz in 1939, he watched the Oscar go to his rival Lyle Wheeler for his work on Gone With the Wind.
Dolores Del Rio
Gibbons was handsome, immaculately dressed, and married to the beautiful Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, and his own life mirrored the film fantasies which carried small-town America through the Depression ravaged 1930s. His carefully cultivated personal image left a lasting impression with the MGM designer Herbert Ryman:
"He would arrived in his Dusenberg, in the grey Homburg hat and the grey gloves, and he would walk up the stairs to the art department . . . walk in and say good morning to his secretary, with all of us in the art department watching him appear and disappear with this elegant procedure."
In 1956 MGM recorded its first-ever loss-making year and ill health forced Gibbons's retirement from the industry. Hollywood's greatest art director died at his home at Westwood, Los Angeles four years later, on July 26th, 1960.
The Oscars handed out each March are almost identical to the first trophy presented over 60 years ago to recipients whom even the keenest film fan of today might fail to recognise. In this business, famed for fickleness as much as fairy-tales, that's probably the most fitting tribute Hollywood can pay to a favourite son and a Dublin-born genius, who left an indelible mark on its golden age.