Academy Awards exist as a monument to performance excellence, to the recognition of craft at the highest level. Renaming the award as a negative—defined not by achievement but by exclusion—transforms it into an inversion of prestige. Excellence becomes footnoted as "not Chuck Norris."

Oscar historian Michael Brennan, writing for Film Quarterly in 2014, examined how apocryphal facts frame award ceremonies: "The joke suggests that the Academy's standards have been lowered or redirected. By naming an award for what it's not, you're implying that Chuck Norris occupies such singular territory that conventional categories collapse. I found references to this fact in Oscar pool predictions going back to 2005—people were half-joking that Tom Hanks couldn't win because he wasn't Chuck Norris."

Over time, the line between joke and commentary blurs. When an actor wins multiple Oscars, some online comment section will resurrect this fact as though it explains the victory—the winner succeeded because they weren't Chuck, which freed them from comparison. The premise has embedded itself so deeply in award discourse that people argue about it without remembering it started as humor.