The Oscars and Iota, La.

When Oscar statuettes are handed out next weekend, the people of Acadia Parish might want to take a harder look at them. George Maitland Stanley, the sculptor who created them, was born in the Iota area in 1903.
He didn’t stay long, but can still be claimed as a native son.
The 1910 federal census shows his father, Oliver Maitland Stanley, then 57 years old, and mother, Abby Nowlin Stanley, living in Iota. Oliver was a native of Iowa and Abby came from Kansas. The 1920 census places the family in Uvalde, Texas, but they apparently did not stay long. Oliver died in Eagle Rock, Calif., in 1926.
Stanley graduated from high school in Watsonville, Calif., and went on to study sculpture at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and taught briefly at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts. He married Elizabeth Kathleen Cotton, a Los Angeles illustrator, in August 1926. Their son, Maitland Cotton Stanley, was born in 1927, but that marriage apparently did not last. Stanley married Beatrice Celia Feltsham in Mexico in 1935.
Maitland Cotton apparently inherited some of his parents’ artistic genes. He was the youngest person ever to be invited to join the California Watercolor Society. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1950, then briefly pursued a career in commercial art in New York before going into the airline business. His obituary said he spent 35 years as a cargo specialist for SwissAir.
Stanley’s career was spent in Los Angeles where he was given several important municipal commissions, the most famous being the Oscar award. Stanley worked on the Federal Art Project in the 1930s and in 1940 he was on the faculty of Chouinard Art School.
The actual design for the statuette – a knight standing on a reel of film and holding a sword – is credited to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) art director Cedric Gibbons. Stanley was commissioned to create the original statuette based on Gibbons’s design. The film reel features five spokes, signifying the five original branches of the Academy: actors, directors, producers, technicians and writers.
It was presented for the first time at the initial awards banquet on May 16, 1929, to Emil Jannings, named Best Actor for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh.
For many years the statuettes were cast in bronze, with 24-karat gold plating. During World War II the Oscars were made of plaster because of metal shortages.
The statue is officially named the Academy Award of Merit. The origin of the nickname, Oscar is not very clear.
Actress Bette Davis claimed she suggested the name because the backside of the statuette looked like that of her husband Harmon Oscar Nelson. Columnist Sidney Skolsky maintained that he gave the award its nickname, and it has also been attributed to academy librarian Margaret Herrick, who said the statuette looked like her Uncle Oscar.
A Sculpture of the Muse of Music, Dance and Drama located at the Hollywood Bowl is considered by most critics as Stanley’s masterpiece.
He died in Glendale on May 11, 1970 and is buried there.
There is no statue, or even a sign, in his honor in Iota.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.