While the validity of the premise is debatable, the idea is that an Oscar nomination is recognizing the superiority of an acting performance. So unless you’re positing some kind of mind control then an actor earned his or her nomination by giving the performance.
You learned it here. The rest of the world realized it was self-evident long before there was an SDMB.
“granted an honor” + “granted the honor” = 1,200
This is the Straight Dope. You asked. Here ya go :
I’ve held a real Oscar statuette in my hands. Also an Emmy, Grammy and Peabody Award. But…somehow…the Oscar got to me. Been nominated four times for an Emmy award. I even had to have a speech ready for one of them, in case our group won- I was told I was gonna speak on behalf. We lost.
Yeah, it is an honor to be nominated. I liked to think I “earned” the nominations. Each one represented incredibly difficult work, executed well enough for my peers to give me a nod and nominate me. But… this thread is making me think I didn’t earn anything but a paycheck for the jobs that were nominated. I think it is proper to say that I was nominated, and had I won, that I would have been Given the award.
Trust me, Jamie Foxx didn’t volunteer his time for " Ray". He got paid good money. He didn’t earn the Oscar. He was voted best, and so won it.
Cartooniverse ( who isn’t bitter about never winning. Nope. Not one bit. Not this guy. Nuh-uh. :dubious: Then again, I do have a couple of Telly Awards on the shelf for jobs I shot. They’re nice too ! 
Again the either/ or fallacy rears its head. The Academy Award is both a prize and an honorarium, and language referring to winning or earning it is used whenever one wants to emphasize the competition to win it, or the esteem of beaing nominated.
BTW, “bestow” + “honor” gets over 800,000 hits. “bestow” + “award” gets 196,000.
I don’t see how earning money and earning an award are mutually exclusive.
Obviously, there are two debates here:
- Over the semantics of “earn” with various direct objects (earn an award, earn an honor, earn a nomination).
I still hold that “earn a nomination” is odd semantically. Not balls-out wrong but still odd. Because it is odd, it strikes me as “spin” when Hollywood PR says “earn a nomination.”
Regardless of what the nomination is (an honor, etc.), it still strikes me as odd to say “earn a nomination” in this sense. The “earn the party’s nomination” seems different to me because the voting process for earning it is predetermined and explicit. Even then, “win the nomination” sounds more natural to me.
You can make an argument (one poster has) that an Academy Award nomination is similarly “earned” because of the voting process involved. That may be so; but it still seems odd because that process is not well known, and the publicists do not say “earned” with the meaning of “earned sufficient votes” but “earned” as if the nomination were an end in itself, a kind of secondary award.
YMMV on the above.
- The second debate is about what the nomination is. I recognize it as a PR bonanza to the nominee and a very good thing in a number of dimensiions, but I deny that it it is an award or honor in its own right. The reason is simple: The nomination doesn’t bear the explicit title, determined by the governing body, of being an honor or award; whereas, in contrast, awards and honors such as honorary degrees always do.
YM ought not to V on the above.
Is there an Oscar nomination for pedantry?
The process for Academy balloting is predetermined and explicit as well (though the outcomes aren’t as predictable as at a convention, though one can count on the process having more integrity with the AMPAS).
It may not be well known to you, but articles every year are written about the convoluted procedure involved in determining the final nominees. It’s certainly not a mystery to anyone remotely familiar with trades like Variety.
Well, every nominee does receive a certificate of nomination from the Academy, and anyone familiar with Oscar campaigns would know that a nomination is an end in itself. Small films like Hotel Rwanda or In America know they have little hope of winning anything, but the nominations will be critical in earning free publicity, gaining wider distribution, and generating millions more at the box office. So even if dark horse candidates have little hope of taking home the statue, they still have achieved something very real, concrete, and potentially career-changing. If nothing else, they’re guaranteed to have their eventual obituary lead “Oscar-nominated actor/director/etc…”
Well, aside from the official AMPAS-sanctioned certificate every nominee gets, the balloting procedure is such that a nomination means that your performance/artistic contribution was considered one of the 5 best in its categories, as determined by industry peers. This goes counter to your assertion that
Of course it does, though that honor is temporarily divided equally among five candidates before an even higher honor is ultimately voted on and determined. Nominations represent a high voting tally result. They are not given randomly, and are not rubber stamped. To “earn” a nomination means (ostensibly) that one has worked at such a high level of excellence to have earned enough #1 votes among Academy members to be considered one of the 5 most worthy of consideration of the top prize. It does not have the same import as winning the whole enchilada, but it certainly isn’t devoid of meaning or relevance as you rather lamely suggest.
Great post, ArchiveGuy. You have successfully fought my ignorance. I concede that an Oscar nomination can be “earned.”
The “certificate of nomination” was the clincher.
I was wrong. Thanks!
“It’s an honor just to be nominated.” = 3660 hits on Google.
No prob, Aeschines–just so long as you don’t taking the Academy’s choices as the final word on any year’s "Best"s…