LOS ANGELES — First lady Michelle Obama ended last year's Academy Awards holding an iridescent gold envelope. Its contents? A ruby-colored, lacquered card with the famous line "And the Oscar goes to ... " plus the name of Best Picture winner Argo
.
At that moment, likely no one except Argo
director Ben Affleck had a bigger smile on his or her face than Marc Friedland, the designer of the Oscar envelopes and announcement cards, which both debuted in 2011 to rave reviews from the likes of actor Tom Hanks.
"It felt like a dream sitting in the [Dolby Theatre] audience and watching Michelle Obama announce the winner live from the White House," Friedland told Mashable
this week during a behind-the-scenes event showcasing how the envelopes are made.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has used sealed envelopes to reveal the winners since 1941 after the Los Angeles Times
leaked the winners of the 13th Academy Awards before the ceremony announced them.
This year, Friedland's team in Hollywood worked 110 hours to create three sets of envelopes for the Oscars' 24 categories (72 envelopes in total) as well as three announcement cards for every nominee (363 cards for 121 nominees). In 2013, four sets were made because one set secretly went to the White House for Obama's inclusion in the live show. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the company that tabulates the votes from the academy members and keeps the results secret until showtime on March 2, stuffs the envelopes with the correct cards.
As he has said in the past three years, Friedland emphasizes the importance of the printed envelopes, even as new technologies and social media continue to digitally transform the Oscars.
"Hopefully the envelope will never become digital because it's a keepsake," he said. "It's the least-tech, most-emotional keepsake I know, and it's perhaps the most-famous envelope in the world."
A few award shows have presenters read winners' names on tablets or teleprompters, but those methods come with the potential dangers of being hacked or malfunctioning.
Mock #Oscars winner envelopes being put together. They're gold and weigh a quarter pound. pic.twitter.com/JC5A5DUpSd
— Jeff Petriello (¬?¬) (@thebeff) February 26, 2014Friedland's team on Wednesday demonstrated the creation process, which he notes includes 10 specialty processes: custom-made paper, hand-tooled die-making, laminating, hand-folding, hand-gluing, hand-wrapping, sheeting, hand-fed gold-leaf stamping, hand-fed embossing and imprinting of nominees' names.The cards in the envelopes are made of "a heavyweight ecru card featuring deco gold foil accents and is accented with a gold-leaf embossed Oscar statuette." They are trapped inside with a red satin ribbon and an embossed seal featuring the PwC logo.
All in all, each pair of envelopes and cards costs $200. After the awards show Sunday, PwC will destroy the announcement cards featuring names of nominees who didn't win.
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