The Oscar statuette is instantly recognizable. For the 93rd Academy Awards, that familiarity offered an opportunity: open an established icon to new interpretations and celebrate the many ways people connect with film.

In 2021, the pandemic was still limiting gatherings and reshaping awards season. The Academy’s “Bring Your Movie Love” campaign centered on the personal connections that make cinema a shared experience, even when audiences could not be together.

Vocabulary collaborated with the Academy on The Stage Is Yours, an art series that gave seven international artists space to reimagine the Oscar. Each began with the same question: “What do movies mean to you?” The brief invited personal responses, allowing different backgrounds, disciplines and experiences to shape the work.

The statuette provided a recognizable foundation, while an expanded color palette opened the campaign to a broader range of moods and treatments. Across illustration, motion design, painting, photography and textile art, the artists explored cinema as escape, inspiration and a means of understanding one another.

Each piece has its own character, yet the recurring Oscar form gives the collection coherence. Seen together, the works suggest a different way of presenting an institution: through the people invited to interpret it. The result feels connected to the Academy’s history while making space for new creative voices.

The artwork appeared across posters and banners, with distribution through the Academy’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook channels. These formats brought the individual pieces into a collective expression for the April 25 ceremony, giving audiences multiple visual entry points into the same celebration of film.

The Stage Is Yours received the Grand Clio for Television/Streaming: Key Art at the 2021 Clio Entertainment Awards, alongside Platinum recognition in the Graphis Advertising Annual 2022.