Around this time every year, we sit down and watch a lot of famous people pat each other on the back and give out awards of questionable distribution to each other in a ritual called The Oscars. It’s a great time to go over the past year or so of film and reward and the people, the actors, directors, musicians, writers, etc., that bring our entertainment to life on the big screen. But this article isn’t about them. They get their nominations and fancy awards every year. This year, this year we talk about some unspoken heroes of the cinema. This year we talk about the props.

For this one, I dusted off a bunch of old social media accounts and ran a series of internet polls over the past two months, ensuring we got as wide a voting pool as possible. While I started the categories with a few “example” nominations, we got a lot of suggestions that I might not have thought of on my own, and the final voting panel consisted of some 800 odd anonymous voters. These people came from Reddit, Discord, Quora, Game FAQs, the decrepit corpse of Something Awful, and even the dreaded 4Chan.

So without further ado, I’d like to thank you for clicking onto the first ever Inanimate Awards Oscar Ceremony. We here at Nerdcrash recognize how many years have gone by without acknowledging the props, and we’re making up for that by selecting our nominees from across Hollywood’s history. So let’s give it up for all those props and sets that have put just as much work as any person into making that one film truly great! Thank you for that round of applause. I’m surely not hallucinating an audience as I write this.

All nomination lists consist of the top 6 most voted answers.

Our first category for the night, is only for how popular and near unanimous it was, will be for Best Supporting Weapon. These not only provide a necessary visual flair to the film’s action scenes, but can also accent a character’s design in a truly memorable fashion. In some cases, the weapon can be just as memorable and iconic, or even more so, than the character that wields it. Our nominees were:

• Freddy’s Claw Glove (Nightmare on Elm Street)
• The Proton Packs (Ghostbusters)
• The Lightsaber (Star Wars)
• The Hatori Hanzo Sword (Kill Bill)
• Wands (Harry Potter)
• Walther PPK (James Bond)

And the award for Best Supporting Weapon goes to… The Lightsaber. I doubt anybody is surprised by this; it utterly swept one of the most voted-in categories with a whopping 68% of the votes. The lightsaber has provided some of the most iconic action sequences in film history, with lightsaber duels often being pointed to as the highlights of the films (especially in the prequels). For those curious about runner ups, Freddy’s glove took roughly 27% of the remaining votes, and the rest got such pittances that the PPK and proton packs only got one vote apiece. The fact that these made the top 6 should tell you just how dominant the sabers and the glove are in the public’s collective memory.

Our second award for the night goes to the Best Thematic and Sentimental Performance by an Object. This is to say, those items that might not speak, but which tied the whole film together with their appearances and thematic resonance. The top nominees in this category were:

• Wilson (Castaway)
• The Red and Blue Pills (The Matrix)
• The Lament Configuration (Hellraiser)
• The Spinning Top (Inception)
• Rosebud (Citizen Cane)
• Heather Chandler’s Bow (Heathers)

This one was a much tighter race, with some close votes that required recounting. The winner, after it all, was none other than Inception’s Spinning Top. This one had a much narrower win than the lightsaber, boasting a mere 18% of the votes. Personally, I had thought Wilson or Rosebud was going to take it on the grounds of a sentimental performance by an object, but it turns out Inception’s ending has stuck with people far more than I ever thought. Congratulations to Nolan on this utterly meaningless award.

Our next two categories go together. For all the celebration we’ve given to the costume designers across film and television, we’ve never quite acknowledged the individual outfits they’ve put together, so we’ll be looking at the best outfits our most memorable characters have worn on the silver screen. Ladies first. Here are the nominees for Best Women’s Outfit:

• The Ruby Slippers (The Wizard of Oz)
• Little Black Dress (Breakfast at Tifany’s)
• Scarlet’s Red Dress (Gone with The Wind)
• Leia’s Gold Bikini (Star Wars)
• Monroe’s White Dress (Seven Year Itch)
• The Bride’s Jumpsuit (Kill Bill)

This category was very, very tightly fought, with far more suggestions and nominations than can be listed here. It just goes to show that no cast is complete without their signature looks. And the winner of the most nominated for category is… The Ruby Slippers, with a mere 8% of all votes. I can’t say I’m surprised by the results given that there are entire documentaries about them and that they’re on display in the Smithsonian, but for a category that had well over 50 different nominees, I really have to say that they earned this one.

And as I’m sure you’ve already realized, the next category is the spear counterpart. Here are the nominees for Best Men’s Outfit:

• Daniel’s Headband (The Karate Kid)
• Indiana Jones’ Whole Look (Indiana Jones)
• Bond’s Tuxedo (James Bond)
• Bateman’s Clear Raincoat (American Psycho)
• Reeves’ Superman Suit (Superman)
• Hockey Mask (Friday the 13th)

This was a much less nominated for category. It seems the men of cinema just don’t have nearly as many memorable looks as the women. The winner, with a whopping 77% of the votes, was Indy’s Whole Look. Indiana Jones, as a visual appearance, was far and away the most popular vote in any category across the many threads I pulled from, which is fascinating given that his whip didn’t even manage a single vote in the weapons category. Regardless, it seems Superman and Bond can give it up, as neither of my suspected frontrunners even managed to cobble together 10%.

Now, this next category isn’t a strictly official term, but it has become so commonly used that it really may as well be. When the plot revolves around the idea that all the characters want something, and that something may or may not be completely interchangeable with any other something for all the effect it has on the plot, we call that a Macguffin. So, here’s one for all those objects that really served no direct purpose beyond being carried about and stolen throughout the film, but which motivated entire casts all the same. The nominees for Most Memorable Macguffin are:

• The Briefcase (Pulp Fiction)
• The Maltese Falcon (The Maltese Falcon)
• Arc of the Covenant (Indiana Jones)
• Rosebud (Pulp Fiction)
• The One Ring (Lord of the Rings)
• Death Star Plans (Star Wars)

We can debate whether or not my voters completely understood the assignment on this one, since I personally wouldn’t call it a Macguffin, but the winner is, The One Ring. Perhaps it is the only thing that could have won, given the trilogy’s place in the public conscience. I was slightly amused by the presence of Rosebud in multiple categories as well. The ring claimed victory with approximately 16% of all votes.

How could you have a movie about getting an object or going anywhere without a means of travel? Our next category is for memorable means of transportation, the vehicles we all remember and wish we could get a ride in. Here are the nominees for Best Supporting Vehicle:

• The Black Pearl (Pirates of the Caribbean)
• Quint’s Boat (Jaws)
• Interceptor (Mad Max)
• The Batmobile (Batman)
• White Lotus (James Bond)
• The DeLorean (Back to the Future)

This one was, outside of women’s outfits, the most tightly fought race, and one where even though it was my first guess, I was still surprised by the final outcome. The winner of Best Supporting Vehicle is, The DeLorean. This was a very even category all throughout, with a lot of close runners-up not listed here. Our favorite time-traveling car takes the win with only 11% of all votes.

Before we get to our closer, we have one more category that I didn’t initially plan on. There were a lot of voters that mentioned props they couldn’t fit into my planned out categories, so this is something of an… Other, category. One for those props that didn’t fit into my outline, but which are just so memorable that people felt the need to keep bringing them up. I don’t have proper percentages for this one, but I thought it worth including nonetheless. The nominees for Other Important Props are:

• The Handbook for the Recently Deceased (Beetlejuice)
• The Zoltar Machine (Big)
• Heart of the Ocean Necklace (Titanic)
• Billy the Puppet (Saw)
• Rolling Boulder (Indiana Jones)
• Electrical Machines (Frankenstein)

For having been brought up the most despite nobody agreeing on which category they belonged to, we give this bonus award to the Electrical Machines in the background of Frankenstein’s lab, which were repurposed and reused for so many different films over the years that they probably showed up in more films than Boris Karloff did.

Our final category for the night is, despite the premise, an acting award. Not for a person, mind you, but for a setting. This category acknowledges that sometimes a location can feel so truly alive that it may as well be one of the characters in a film. Our nominees, for Sets and Settings that Were Their own Characters are:

• Hogwarts (Harry Potter)
• Brokeback Mountain (Brokeback Mountain)
• The War Room (Dr. Strangelove)
• Rick’s Café (Casablanca)
• The Overlook Hotel (The Shining)
• Seahaven (The Truman Show)

This was another hard-fought category, as each of these locations is so memorable that their films would frankly have been worse if scenes had taken place anywhere else. The winner of our final category, Sets and Settings that Were Their own Characters, is Hogwarts. I’m not sure what else I expected when asking people who use the internet what the most memorable and alive setting was, but was happy to at least see answers from a variety of genres for this one. Hogwarts took this award with 28% of the total votes.

And with that, we come to the end of our awards ceremony. I appreciate you all for coming out to read this tonight, or in the middle of the day, or whenever it is for you. Across all these categories, I was shocked by how certain films just didn’t get mentioned at all (I really thought we’d hear about the infinity gems as Macguffins), but it was a fascinating dive into public perception to learn exactly which movies everyone seems to remember so fondly. And to Star Wars and the original Indiana Jones trilogy, you were the most nominated films, so you clearly did something right.