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One thing is certain at Academy Awards ceremonies - no one is ever assured to walk away with a trophy. But for over two decades, one person has been guaranteed to hold the Oscar - Noreen Prohaska.
Prohaska has been working as a regional sales manager and account executive for Chicago manufacturer R.S. Owens for nearly 25 years.
But what exactly is R.S. Owens' role in all this? It's the company that makes the little golden men.
"The Oscar account has raised our profile significantly," Prohaska said. "Recognition is a very upbeat business to be in."
The award itself was born in 1928, designed as a knight holding a sword by MGM Studios chief art director Cedric Gibbons, four years before R.S. Owens even began. Owens' founding owner Charles Siegel started the company as, of all things, a pigeon supplier.
Eventually Owens began manufacturing trophies, Prohaska said, beginning with awards for bowling and baseball tournaments. But the Oscar was certainly Owens' big break. In 1983, when then-Oscar manufacturer Dodge Trophy of Crystal Lake, Ill., went out of business, the crumbling company recommended R.S. Owens to the Academy as its successor. The Academy then called Siegel's son Scott, who had taken over the company from his father. The trophy was theirs to make, and it has been theirs ever since.
Owens has not made any alterations to the design of the famous award, aside from giving Oscar a much-needed chin-lift nearly a decade ago when the mold was wearing out.
Each award goes through a standard and precise two-day process. Initially, a four-piece steel mold is filled with brittanium, a melted silvery alloy. Once the Oscar is cast and cools, the statue is polished. Then the electroplating process begins, in which the statue is dipped into a series of tanks, covering it first in copper, then nickel, then silver and finally, 24-karat gold.
The base is made separately, it is spun out of brass and finished with nickel black. When the parts come together after 14 hours of hand labor, the award is ready for packaging and personal shipment to Los Angeles, attended to by Ms. Prohaska herself.
Once all of the winners are announced, which Prohaska assures she doesn't know until the actual ceremony, their names are faxed to the company who engraves the name plates and sends them to Los Angeles.
Prohaska said that a team of about 14 employees works on each year's order of 60 Oscars over the course of about three weeks. Owens also has refurbished more than 160 older awards since 1995, including Gregory Peck's Best Actor trophy for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Shelly Winters' Best Supporting Actress award for her performance in "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Owens also has made Emmys, Clios, MTV Video Music Awards and the NFL's MVP trophy. Copies of all these awards fill a lavish display case in the company's boardroom, standing alongside an ornate Pillsbury Doughboy, Nintendo's Mario, a Starship Enterprise and model McDonald stores that Owens has made as corporate awards.
And while the shine of the eight-pound Oscars glistens through their plastic wrapping on the Owens manufacturing floor, Prohaska won't reveal the awards' cost, stressing that their worth to the winners cannot be measured. Prohaska said she wins as well, seeing their faces during the ceremony year in and year out.
"Recognition [by our peers] is a psychic income," Prohaska beams. "You can't put a dollar amount on it."
The 77th Annual Academy Awards will air this Sunday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m. on ABC-7.
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