Shakespeare In Love

Question: When a film wins for best picture at the Academy Awards, who gets to take home the Oscar? Does each of the executive producers get to take one home or is there just a single statue that they all have to share? I've wondered this for many years, and I figured it was finally time to end my silence!

Answer: This is a very timely question, and one with implications beyond how many Oscar statuettes the Academy has to have made for various best-picture winners. First, the award does go to the producer or producers, not to the director — the auteur-vision thing notwithstanding — or to the executive producer(s). For some years now, there's been concern among the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about what's been dubbed "credit creep," and specifically the proliferation in recent years of credited producers, coproducers, executive producers, coexecutive producers and associate producers, and there's been a read more