Oscar - believe in or not

The Academy Awards, as of February 20, 2013 officially re-branded as The Oscars, are a set of awards given annually for excellence of cinematic achievements. The Oscar statuette is officially named the Academy Award of Merit and is one of nine types of Academy Awards. Organized and overseen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the awards are given each year at a formal ceremony. The AMPAS was originally conceived by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio executive Louis B. Mayer as a professional honorary organization to help improve the film industry’s image and help mediate labor disputes. The awards themselves were later initiated by the Academy as awards "of merit for distinctive achievement" in the industry.

The awards were first given in 1929 at a ceremony created for the awards, at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood. Over the years that the award has been given, the categories presented have changed; currently Oscars are given in more than a dozen categories, and include films of various types. As one of the most prominent award ceremonies in the world, the Academy Awards ceremony is televised live in more than 100 countries annually. It is also the oldest award ceremony in the media; its equivalents, the Grammy Awards (for music), the Emmy Awards (for television), and the Tony Awards (for theater), are modeled after the Academy Awards.

The Oscar statuette is made of gold-plated britannium on a black metal base, it is 13.5 in (34 cm) tall, weighs 8.5 lb (3.85 kg) and depicts a knight rendered in Art Deco style holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes. The five spokes each represent the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers, and Technicians.

In 1928, MGM's art director Cedric Gibbons, one of the original Academy members, supervised the design of the award trophy by printing the design on a scroll. In need of a model for his statuette, Gibbons was introduced by his future wife Dolores del Río to Mexican film director and actor Emilio "El Indio" Fernández. Reluctant at first, Fernández was finally convinced to pose nude to create what today is known as the "Oscar". Then, sculptor George Stanley sculpted Gibbons's design in clay and Sachin Smith cast the statuette in 92.5 percent tin and 7.5 percent copper and then gold-plated it. The only addition to the Oscar since it was created is a minor streamlining of the base. The original Oscar mold was cast in 1928 at the C.W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, Illinois, which also contributed to casting the molds for the Vince Lombardi Trophy and Emmy Awards statuettes. Since 1983, approximately 50 Oscars are made each year in Chicago by Illinois manufacturer R.S. Owens & Company.

As a movie lover, I watched the ceremony some years. Some of the movie winners are worth watching. Who will win tonight? Argo or Life of Pi? I will be happy to see Anne Hathaway to win hers and Daniel Day-Lewis to win his.

But there is one person who is well known not to attend the Oscar for his wins.

Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician whose career spans over half a century. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish; his grandparents were immigrants from Russia and Austria, who spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, and German.Allen spoke German quite a bit during his early years. To raise money he began writing jokes for the agent David O. Alber, who sold them to newspaper columnists. According to Allen, his first published joke read: "Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices – over people's salaries." He began to call himself Woody Allen. He would later joke that when he was young he was often sent to inter-faith summer camps, where he "was savagely beaten by children of all races and creeds." At the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen. He was already earning more than both of his parents combined

He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.

His first movie was the Charles K. Feldman production What's New Pussycat? in 1965, for which he wrote the initial screenplay. He became disappointed with the final product, which inspired him to direct every film that he would later write.

By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 40 films are Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Midnight in Paris (2011).

With one exception, Woody Allen has never attended the Academy Awards. In spite of his previous 21 nominations and three wins, he declines the invites. He's known for it, so notoriously so that urban myths are told as to why. He broke this pattern only once. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2002, Allen made an unannounced appearance, making a plea for producers to continue filming their movies in New York City after the 9-11 attacks, where he stated, "I didn't have to present anything. I didn't have to accept anything. I just had to talk about New York City." He was given a standing ovation before introducing a montage of movie clips featuring New York.

Why he never showed up Oscar for his wins? One simple reason: He doesn't believe in it.

"It's really almost impossible, as he puts it, to judge art, that it's so subjective, you can't really say, well, this performance is better than that or that writing is better than this and that, if you get caught in that trap of relying on other people, however great they are, to tell you whether you're any good, you're either going to consciously or subconsciously start playing to that group."

Back in 1974, when his funny, futuristic hit "Sleeper" was ignored by the Academy, Allen was quoted as saying, "The whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't."

He is a short tiny but smart person with focus on what he wants to do without others' influence. He doesn't care what others say. He doesn't have to please everyone.

It was no surprise of his coping with the famous scandal when he started relationship with Song-Yi Previn (In 1991, when the relationship started, Allen was 56 and Previn was 19). Allen's and Farrow's biological son, Ronan Farrow, is widely quoted as disparaging Allen and having said he cannot see him. On Father's Day 2012, he tweeted "Happy father's day— or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law's day"

June 22, 2011, Reuters quoted Allen as saying, "What was the scandal? I fell in love with this girl, married her. We have been married for almost 15 years now. There was no scandal, but people refer to it all the time as a scandal and I kind of like that in a way because when I go I would like to say I had one real juicy scandal in my life."

Asked whether their age difference was conducive to "a healthy, equal relationship," Allen said equality is not necessarily a requirement in a relationship and "The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that."

He may not be a good father or partner, he will be still considered as "a treasure of the cinema". I haven't seen most of his movies, I do want to see the Midnight in Paris someday. Everyone has their own version of Paris dream. :-)))))))))))