There was plenty to chatter about after the Academy Awards on Sunday (Parasite! Eminem? etc) but only one segment had connections to one of the most haunting corners of D.C. Kazu Hiro, who took home an Oscar for his makeup work on the drama Bombshell, also created the incredibly lifelike, big-headed bust of Abraham Lincoln that peers from the window of the Lincoln Theatre.

Hiro is best known as a makeup and prosthetics artist and sculptor for film. His dozens of credits include Men in Black, the live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and 2001’s Planet of the Apes. Bombshell, in which he transformed Charlize Theron into a very scary convincing Megyn Kelly and John Lithgow into a many-joweled Roger Ailes, is the Kyoto-born artist’s second Oscar win: He also took home a statue for his prosthetic work on Gary Oldman in the 2017’s Winston Churchill drama Darkest Hour. Hiro has four Oscar nods in total, including for 2006’s Click and 2008’s Norbit (the only Academy Award nomination for each of these critically panned films).

In accepting the trophy on Sunday night with his colleagues Anne Morgan and Vivian Baker, Hiro thanked Theron, who starred in and produced the film about the ousting of Ailes at Fox News after allegations of sexual harassment and assault. “Because of your bravery and passion, we are able to set a new bar in the makeup industry and create a new way to tell stories,” he said.

Creating eight-times larger-than-life statues like Abe, Frida Kahlo, Jimi Hendrix, and Andy Warhol was meant to be Hiro’s retirement from films, because working in the industry had been taxing. “I felt like my body was starting to fall apart, and also my mind,” he told Voice of America in a 2019 interview.

Each of his sculptures takes two and a half to four months to create, he told VOA. Lincoln’s giant noggin is made of silicone rubber, polyester resin, and wood; and his hair, beard, and eyebrows are constructed with human and yak hair. The mixed-media sculpture appeared in an exhibit on Lincoln at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in California in 2013, and at the Tresor Gallery in New Orleans. That’s where it caught the eye of Seth Hurwitz, co-chair of I.M.P., which operates the Lincoln Theatre. “He was like, ‘Oh my god, we have to have that for the Lincoln,'” Audrey Fix Schaefer, the company’s communications director, tells DCist.

The company acquired the sculpture in 2017 (Fix Schaefer declined to disclose the price of the piece), and it’s watched over that busy stretch of U Street ever since. If you think there might be a hint of a smile on Honest Abe’s face, you’re right. “I strive for a kind of reticence, an ambiguity that teases your curiosity to keep you guessing at what thoughts lurk behind those eyes,” Hiro writes in the artist statement on his site. “When a neutral expression is adjusted just right, it can trigger an illusion that the face is on the verge of sliding into different moods. It’s a kind of subtlety that serves as a mask hiding a complexity beneath.”

The statue is the second straight year that I.M.P has had a connection to the Oscars. Hurwitz made a brief appearance in last year’s best picture winner, Green Book.