The 88th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, also known as the Oscars, will take place this Sunday, February 28th in Hollywood. The celebrities will be aplenty, but the real star of the show is the Oscar statuette itself. This year, Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry located in Rock Tavern, New York had the honor of producing the 50 Oscar statuettes that will go home with the winners. Before moving across the Hudson River, the foundry used to be located in the very same building where Niche now makes our handblown glass lighting. 

For the last 33 years, the Oscar statuette was manufactured in a Chicago trophy shop where they were cast in britannia metal (the fancy name for tin) and gold-plated. The Academy sought to return to the original process of wax cast bronze to preserve tradition, longevity, and quality. The new 2016 Oscar made by Polich Tallix fuses the characteristics of the original 1928 Oscar design to the contemporary form of today's Oscar through 3-D modeling.

The Oscar statuettes wouldn't be complete without Polich Tallix's longtime partnership with Brooklyn-based company Epner Technology. Using their Laser Gold (Epner's trademarked ultra-high reflective pure gold), the statuettes were electroplated with 24 karat gold (pictured below).

Take a look at the entire Oscar statuette process in Polich Tallix's photo gallery and watch the awards ceremony on Sunday night to congratulate our Hudson Valley neighbors. We're so happy to see hard work and handmade in New York quality recognized at such a prestigious level!

Photographs by Chris Roque, courtesy of Polich Tallix.