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  3. The Oscar Every spring, the movie industry gears up for its biggest celebration: the Academy Awards, more commonly known as

The Oscar Every spring, the movie industry gears up for its biggest celebration: the Academy Awards, more commonly known as

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问题                             The Oscar
    Every spring, the movie industry gears up for its biggest celebration: the Academy Awards, more commonly known as the Oscars. There is extensive press coverage of the event, even down to the arrival of the stars; flash bulbs and microphones abound as the nominees and other famous, well-dressed guests make their way down the "red carpet", flanked by cheering onlookers.

    The Oscars are most powerful and glamorous not just for Hollywood’s sake, though — millions of people tune in every year to root for their favorite movies and actors, check out the incredible clothing on display, or maybe just catch any embarrassing podium misadventure as they happen.
The Academy
    So many Oscar winners gush, "I would like to thank the academy" that it’s become a cliche. But what is the Academy, anyway? And why should it be thanked?
    The Academy, in this case, is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a professional honorary society formed in 1927. In spirit, the Academy is something like the Phi Beta Kappa Society or National Honor Society. It’s an organization dedicated to promoting excellence in a particular field(filmmaking). Just like similar organizations, it has many members connected to that field(more than 6,000 filmmaking professionals).
    You must be invited by the Academy to become a member. Different branches of the Academy(focusing on different aspects of the filmmaking world)have their own standards of eligibility for potential members.
    The Academy is involved in a lot of different projects — from film preservation to developing new film technology — but it’s best known for its yearly awards ceremony. The purpose of the Academy Awards is to promote excellence in filmmaking by honoring extraordinary achievements from the previous year.
    Members of the academy, including actors, producers, directors and a variety of other film craftsmen, choose who will receive the awards that year by casting ballots. So when a winner thanks the academy, he or she is really thanking all their professional peers who collectively decided to confer the honor. They’re also thanking the organization as a whole, which decided to hand out awards in the first place.
    That’s the story of the Academy, in a nutshell. But then who’s Oscar?
All about Oscars
    We generally think of the entire Academy Awards ceremony as "the Oscars", but Oscar is really just a nickname for the actual award statuettes and their image.
    When MGM art director Cedric Gibbons and sculptor George Stanley created the statuette in 1928, the Academy referred to it as the Academy Award of Merit. It didn’t take on the name Oscar until the 1930s.
    There are several stories about the nickname’s origin, and nobody is completely sure of the truth. The Academy supports this version: In the early ’30s, an Academy librarian named Margaret Herrick remarked that the statue looked like her Uncle Oscar. The name stuck, and the Academy staff began referring to the statue as "Oscar". In 1934, Sidney Skolsky mentioned the nickname in a column on Katharine Hepburn’s first Best Actress win. The name caught on, and the Academy officially adopted it in 1939.
    According to the Academy, the Oscar statuette depicts a crusader knight(十字军骑士), grasping a sword. The knight stands on a film reel, with five spokes that represent the five original branches of the Academy: Directors, Actors, Writers, Producers and Technicians.
    The statuette weighs 8. 5-pounds(3.85 kg)and stands 13. 5-inches(34.3 cm)tall. Craftsmen at R. S. Owens & Company carefully cast each statuette in britannium(a metal alloy), and plate it with 24-karat gold. The figure is mounted to a round, black marble base.
Picking the Winners
    The first stage in selecting Oscar winners is narrowing all the possible honorees in a given year down to five nominees for each award category. To be eligible for nominations in any of the feature film categories, a movie must meet these basic requirements:
    It must be more than 40 minutes long.
    Its public premiere(初次公演)must have been in a movie theater, during the appropriate calendar year(during 2003, for the 76th Academy Awards).
    It must have premiered in 35mm or 70mm film format or in 24-frame, progressive scan digital format.
    It must have played in an L. A. County theater, for paid admission, for seven consecutive days, beginning in the appropriate calendar year.
    If a producer or distributor would like their eligible film to be considered for an Oscar nomination, they must submit an Official Screen Credits form. This form lists the production credits for all related Oscar categories. The Academy collects these forms and lists the submitted films in the Reminder List of Eligible Releases. In January, the Academy mails a nomination ballot and a copy of the Reminder List to each Academy member.
    For most of the award categories, only Academy members in that particular field are allowed to vote for nominees(that is, only directors submit nominations for best director and only editors submit nominations for best editor). Foreign film and documentary nominees are chosen by special screening groups made up of Academy members from all branches, and everybody gets to select best picture nominees. Foreign film nominees are selected from a list of films submitted by foreign nations. Every foreign country can only submit one film per year.
    An Academy member can select five nominees per category, ranked in order of preference. For most categories, voters write in only the film title. For acting categories, the voters pick specific actors. It’s up to the individual Academy voters to decide whether an actor should be nominated for leading role or supporting role. An actor can’t be nominated for both categories for a single performance, however. The Academy assigns the nominee to whichever category the nominee qualifies for first. Producers often take out ads in Variety and other major movie industry magazines to suggest nominees for particular categories.
    Academy members typically have a couple of weeks to submit their choices for nominees. Once the ballots are in, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers tabulates the nominee ballot votes in secrecy. Soon after, the Academy announces the nominees in an early morning press conference at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills.
    A week or so later, the Academy mails final ballots to all Academy members. Members have two weeks to return the ballots, and then the "polls" are closed. PricewaterhouseCoopers tabulates the votes in absolute secrecy and seals the results.
    While all this is going on, production companies are sinking considerable funds into campaigning for their contenders. The Academy condones any efforts to get Academy members to see the films, but restricts production companies from mailing out inappropriate incentives. Production companies are allowed to send Academy members video copies of contender films, and to organize special screenings of their films.
Categories
    The Oscars honor the entire spectrum of filmmaking, from acting to technical achievement. There are now 15 Academy branches in all: actors, art directors, cinema-tographers, directors, documentary, executives, film editors, makeup, music, producers, public relations, short films and feature animation, sound, visual effects, writers.
    There are now 24 competitive Oscar categories, and a handful of special-recognition Oscars every year. This year, awards will be given for: Actor in a Leading Role, Actor in a Supporting Role, Actress in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Animated Feature Film, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Directing, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, Film Editing, Writing(Original Screenplay), Writing(Adapted Screenplay), Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound, Short Film — Live Action, Short Film — Animated, Best Picture, Music(Song), Music(Score), Makeup, Foreign Language Film.
Why should Oscar winners thank the Academy?
选项 A、They are just out of courtesy to thank the award presenters.
B、If there is no Academy, there exist no Oscar winners.
C、It’s useful to give the audiences a pleasant impression.
D、The actors don’t know what to say except the thanks.
答案B
解析 在这一小标题开头，作者便提出了这一问题：获奖人为什么要感谢学院，7但接下来作者没有立即回答这一问题，而是讲述了学院的由来、职能等，直到最后才说之所以要感谢学院这个组织是因为这一奖项是学院设立的，没有学院就没有此奖项，[B]正确。
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