Yeah, at some point, the winners return the Oscar to AMPAS to get their names engraved on the base (along with the category and film they won it for). I think the return is preconditioned on you accepting the terms as stipulated by the Academy. If DDL doesn’t want to do so, then I suppose he can just keep what he received on stage, but when he tries to sell it later, how can he (or his heirs) prove that it’s his Oscar and not just one that fell off the truck? They can’t, really. And AMPAS isn’t about to present some kind of certificate of authenticity. So, there you go.
Actually, I think the engraved ones are ready before the show, as there was some blip in the news a few years back when they were stolen a couple of days before the show.
This site says they’re engraved after being awarded and then returned to the winners. It’d be really hard to keep the results secret if the engravers knew ahead of time.
There’s a lot of interesting Oscar info at that site.
They prepare enough Oscar statuettes every year in the eventuality that each nomination with the most individual nominees (highest possible scenario) wins. If there’s a team of 5 up for a writing nomination, for example, they’ll have 5 Oscars ready in the wings in case that nomination wins. This means that they’ll almost always have extra Oscars left over at the end of the night. When those Oscars were stolen, they were the pre-engraved ones; AuntiePam’s correct that there’s no way the AMPAS would leak the winners to anybody for any reason. The 2 PriceWaterhouseCoopers guys are literally the only 2 people on the planet who know who’s going to win. When they have a pre-taped announcement of a winner (like the soldiers in Iraq or Seinfeld’s animated Bee), they make versions for each individual nominee and then cue them up, and the PWC guy sits in the control booth, opens the envelope, and tells the director of the show which one to punch up for broadcast. All tallies of winners and nominees are tabulated by hand, nothing is computerized, and the whole secrecy things in taken incredibly seriously.
Actually, for Seinfeld’s animated bee, they had the character hold the card up so it hid his mouth, and Seinfeld’s voice definitely changed when he said the winner. Is it possible they had him backstage on a microphone and handed him the card to read right there?
Possible but unlikely (and unnecessary). They just held the card up so the mouth wouldn’t have to be animated five different times for the 5 different possible winners. I’d suspect that all 5 nominees were pre-recorded by him, and they just punched up the one that won (the “voice-changing” thing is something I’ve noticed when other animated characters–Bugs Bunny, Buzz Lightyear, etc.–have announced this category; consider it an aural artifact of going down a list vs. staying in “character”).
Makes sense.
I forget when, but there was one year when an animated character had his lips synched up to the winner, but they usually do the “have the character’s mouth covered” trope.