Managing to claim an Oscar has to be the high point of the career of anybody that is involved in the movie industry, and the goody bags that they get even just for turning up goes above and beyond the realms of what most of us could imagine. However, it has not always been like that when it comes to this particular awards ceremony.
Instead, things were understandably not as ostentatious when World War 2 was in action. The movie industry was still working away and the Oscars were still being held every single year, but the last thing that they wanted was to be seen to be spending huge sums of money on awards. However, as the show must indeed go on, they thought of an alternative that would hopefully still mean something to those individuals that won, but could not be seen by outsiders as them wasting precious money.
So, what was this amazing solution that they all came up with? Well, during the period of World War 2, they opted to make the Oscars out of wood. There was enough of it available and people were certainly not as concerned about the costs of manufacturing a wooden Oscar compared to other options, so everybody literally was a winner in that instance.