15 OSCAR FACTS

 Hello there puny humans,
tonight Hollywood's biggest award show will be taking place. So before you grab your snacks and watch the rich and the famous receive even more praise and gold, I rounded up 15 facts about the Academy Awards you might not know about:

1. Back in the day of silent film, there was a category called Best Dance Direction.

2. Billy Crystal has hosted the Oscars nine times, beginning in 1990 and most recently in 2012.

3. The youngest category of them all is Best Animated Feature which was introduced in 2001, with Shrek as its first winner.

4. After audiences were hugely disappointed that The Dark Knight didn't get a Best Picture nomination in 2009, the number of possible films nominated for that category was increased from five to ten.

5. It Happened One Night (1934), One Flew over Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Silence of the Lambs (1991) are the only films to win in all of the "Big Five" (Actor/Actress/Film/Director/Script).

6. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was nominated for eleven Oscars and won all of them, which makes it one of only three movies to receive that many Academy Awards.

7. No actor or actress has ever been nominated as often as Meryl Streep, with nineteen nominations of which she won three.

8. Walt Disney won a total of twenty-two Oscars, and is therefore the undisputed record holder.

9. The oldest winner of an acting award is Christopher Plummer, who received an Oscar at age 82 for his role in Beginners (2011).

10. Youngest winner of an acting award is was the ten year-old Tatum O'Neal in 1973.

11. Quvenzhané Wallis was the first person born in the 21st century to be nominated for an Academy Award.

12. Marlon Brando refused his award for Best Actor for The Godfather (1972) to protest against discrimination toward Native Americans by the U.S. and Hollywood.

13. For the 1941 Academy Awards, sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland were both nominated for the Best Actress award. Fontaine won the Oscar. Jealousy between the two sisters continued to escalate after this and the two have been estranged for decades.

14. Nobody really knows where the name "Oscar" comes from.

15. The first Oscar ceremony, in 1929, lasted 15 minutes.


There you go, these are my 15 facts about the Academy Awards! So now, I just hope you'll have a lot of fun with tonights ceremony.

Your Cinemartian