🏆 Academy Awards (Oscars)

The golden statuette everyone knows as the Oscar weighs 3.85 kilograms and stands 34 centimeters tall. It’s small, cold to the touch, but in the right hands it can change a career, save a studio, or consign a director to oblivion. Since 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood has presented it each year in a ceremony that halts the world: the Oscars. They are not just awards; they are the thermometer of an industry that looks at itself in the mirror to decide which stories deserve to be remembered. The first edition, in 1929, lasted fifteen minutes. Today, the gala stretches for hours, broadcast live to more than two hundred countries, with a parade of costumes, speeches and controversies that make it the most‑watched show of the year after the Super Bowl. But behind the glamour lies a complex system: more than ten thousand Academy members—actors, directors, technicians—vote in a process that begins with the nominations and ends on that night at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Every vote counts, although not all carry the same weight: actors, for example, can only vote in their own category, while directors have a say in almost every one. The Oscar for Best Picture is the top prize, but it does not always align with the critics’ or the public’s favorite. *Crash* (2005) won against the odds, leaving *Brokeback Mountain* out, a film that today is studied in film schools. *Green Book* (2018) repeated the story: praised by some, dismissed as simplistic by others. The Academy has its biases— for decades, superhero movies didn’t even enter the conversation— but it has also learned to correct itself. In 2002, *A Beautiful Mind* took home Best Picture and Best Director, a belated recognition of auteur cinema that had previously been ignored. And in 2020, *Parasite* made history by becoming the first non‑English‑language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, a milestone many saw as a sign of opening. Not everything shines. The Oscars have been the stage for protests, boycotts and uncomfortable moments. In 1973, Marlon Brando refused his statuette for *The Godfather* to denounce the treatment of Native Americans in Hollywood. In 2016, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite highlighted the lack of diversity among the nominees, a criticism the Academy tried to address with changes to its inclusion rules. And in 2022, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock live, an episode that eclipsed the rest of the gala and made clear that, even on the most glamorous night, the human factor— with its errors and passions— always ends up prevailing. Records also tell their own story. Katharine Hepburn won four Oscars for Best Actress, a number that seems unattainable today. Walt Disney remains the most‑awarded in history, with 22 statuettes. And Meryl Streep, with 21 nominations, is the actress with the most nods, although she has won only three. Behind these numbers lie decades of work, but also of luck: a film can be excellent and not make the final list, while another, mediocre, slips in thanks to a multimillion‑dollar marketing campaign. The ceremony itself is a genre of its own. The most remembered speeches are often the briefest—like Joe Pesci’s in 1991: "It’s an honor… And that’s all"— or the most emotional, like Halle Berry’s in 2002, the first Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress. The presenters, for their part, try to balance humor with solemnity, though they don’t always succeed. Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres have been some of the most applauded, while others, such as James Franco in 2011, passed without fanfare or glory. What no one disputes is the power of the Oscars to set trends. A nominated film sees its box‑office surge in the weeks leading up to