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1. The first Oscars ceremony was more of a private dinner. In 1929, it lasted just 15 minutes at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with 270 people in attendance.
2. In sharp contrast, between 3,300 and 3,400 people are expected to attend today’s event at the Dolby Theatre.
3. Back in 1929, the winners were shared under embargo a whole three months before the ceremony through the press.
4. A movie with sound, The Jazz Singer, won a special award at the first ceremony, with all other winners being silent movies.
5. The honour is officially named the Academy Award of Merit, while Oscar is the nickname given to the statuette.
6. According to folklore, Academy librarian Margaret Herrick remarked that the statuette resembled her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.
7. The Academy didn’t adopt the nickname officially until 1939.
8. These days, the statuettes are solid bronze and plated in 24-carat gold.
9. In the early days, they were made from a tin based alloy, Britanium.
10. Cedric Gibbons, an art director, designed the statuette.
11. Over the next several years, Gibbons would go on to win 11 Oscars himself, for Art Direction.
12. It takes the New York-based foundry, Polich Tallix, three months to make around 50 statuettes that are needed for the ceremony.
13. During World War II, due to a metal shortage, the Oscar statues were made of painted plaster for about three years.
14. Following the war, the Academy invited recipients to redeem the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones.
15. After Bette Davis was snubbed for Of Human Bondage in 1935, critics accused the voting process as being opaque. To restore credibility, an external firm, PwC, was hired.
16. The 14th Academy Awards saw the traditional pomp scaled down due to the American entry into World War II.
17. In 1949, five major film companies announced the discontinuation of their annual subsidy to the Academy, threatening the funding of the awards.
18. Between 1947 and 1955, the Academy honored foreign films with special or honourary non-competitive awards.
19. It was not until 1953 that the ceremony would be broadcast on TV.
20. In 1956, The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (now known as Best International Feature Film) was officially introduced.
21. Since 1951, Oscar winners cannot sell or transfer their trophies without first offering them back to the Academy for a symbolic sum of $1.
22. The rule extends to the heirs of Oscar winners too, meaning even they can’t resell the statuettes.
23. Therefore, only pre 1951 Oscars are available for collectors, and these are highly sought after.
24. In 1993, Vivien Leigh’s family auctioned her Best Actress award for Gone With The Wind for $563,000.
25. In 1999, Michael Jackson purchased the 1939 Best Picture Oscar for Gone With The Wind for $1.5 million.
26. In 2012, a collection of 15 statues sold for over $3 million.
27. Orson Welles’s award for Citizen Kane (1941) sold for over $800,000.
28. Since 2010, winners can get their names engraved at the ‘engraving bar’ at the Governor’s Ball, the official Oscars after party.
29. The first ceremony gave out two Best Picture awards, the second category named ‘Best Unique and Artistic Picture’.
30. The Academy introduced a special Juvenile Oscar in 1935, with a miniature statuette awarded to outstanding child performers.
31. Shirley Temple was the first recipient of this award. She was aged just six when she won it.
32. The last recipient was Hayley Mills in 1961.
33. Walt Disney holds the record for most Oscars: He won 22 competitive awards.
34. Disney also holds the record for ..
35. The only movie ever to receive awards two consecutive years was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
36. It won Best Music in 1938, and won a Special Academy Award in 1939.
37. The second award, in 1939, consisted of one normal statuette and seven miniature Oscars.
38. The idea of a full-sized Oscar statuette along with seven smaller ones came from film director Frank Capra.
39. The first non-English Best Picture winner was Parasite (2019).
40. The first woman nominated for Best Director was Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties (1977).
41. In 1960, Ben-Hur became the first film to win 11 Oscars.
42. Midnight Cowboy (1969) is the only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture.
43. The Godfather II is the first sequel to win Best Picture.
44. For The Godfather, three actors (James Caan, Robert Duvall, Al Pacino) were nominated for the Best Supporting Actor award. None of them won.
45. A streaker ran naked across the stage during the 1974 awards ceremony.
46. Daniel Day-Lewis is the only actor with three Best Actor wins (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln).
47. Among women, Katharine Hepburn holds the record for four acting Oscars (Morning Glory, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, On Golden Pond).
48. Meryl Streep holds the record for most acting nominations (17 for Best Actress and four for Best Supporting Actress).
49. In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director.
50. Tatum O’Neal remains the youngest acting winner (age 10) in 1974.
51. Anthony Hopkins is the oldest acting winner (age 83).
52. The shortest performance to win an Oscar was Beatrice Straight in Network, who had about five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time.
53. Christopher Plummer is the oldest nominee for acting (aged 88), for All the Money in the World.
54. John Williams is the oldest Oscar nominee in any category, at age 90, after receiving his 53rd Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.
55. Williams, incidentally, has been nominated across seven different decades.
56. Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for Best Director, but never won.
57. The only Oscar Stanley Kubrick won was for Best Visual Effects.
58. In the initial days, there used to be a Best Assistant Director category. It lasted from 1933 to 1937.
59. The category was discontinued because the Academy said assistant directors’ work had too much overlap with directing.
60. A Best Dance Direction category existed from 1935 to 1937.
61. Dance direction disappeared as musicals became less central to filmmaking.
62. Hattie McDaniel became the first Black Oscar winner in 1940. She won for her role in Gone with the Wind.
63. Because of segregation laws, McDaniel had to sit at a separate table in the ballroom.
64. Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor award in 1973 in protest of the ill treatment of Native Americans by the film industry.
65. Both Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro won for playing the same character, Vito Corleone, in The Godfather and The Godfather II.
66. The 1968 ceremony was postponed for two days due to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
67. Barbra Streisand tied with Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress in 1969, the only instance where an acting award was shared, with two recipients getting the same number of votes.
68. When Charlie Chaplin received an Honorary Oscar in 1972, it marked Chaplin’s return to the US after 20 years away, after he was labelled as a communist at the height of the Cold War.
69. Chaplin was given a 12-minute standing ovation, the longest in Oscar history.
70. Mary J Blige made Oscar history by being the first person to be nominated for both an acting award and Best Original Song.
71. James Dean is the only actor with two posthumous acting nominations.
72. Oscar speeches are normally limited to 45 seconds these days, before the music starts.
73. The clock starts from the moment the winner reaches the microphone.
74. In 2017, a mix up between La La Land and Moonlight happened because presenters were given the wrong envelope by PwC accountants.
75. When Parasite won best picture, the producers shut the lights off after two-and-a-half minutes.
76. The longest speech ever (six minutes) is believed to have been by Greer Garson, who won best actress in 1943.
77. The longest speech in recent history was by Adrien Brody.
78. The red carpet is over 900 feet of red-colored filament nylon pile carpeting.
79. To qualify for the awards, movies must complete a commercial run of at least seven consecutive days in one of six US cities with three shows daily.
80. These cities include Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago and Miami.
81. At least one of those screenings should begin between 6 pm and 10 pm.
82. To ensure that the Oscar venue hall always looks full on TV, seat fillers move in among the audience and take their place whenever people in the crowd need a break.
83. Bhanu Athaiya, the first Indian to win an Oscar for Gandhi (1984), was also the costume designer for Lagaan (2001), which received a nomination.
84. The Scientific and Technical Awards, separate from the main ceremony, have gone to inventors of cameras, CGI software, even motion capture systems.
85. The Academy’s membership being overwhelmingly male and white led to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy a decade ago.
86. Since then, between 2016 and 2020, the Academy doubled the number of women and minority members.
87. The turn of the century came with controversies over how producers like disgraced Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein were campaigning for Oscars.
88. Saving Private Ryan allegedly lost the 1999 Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love because of Weinstein’s influence ops.
89. Campaigning rules are now tightly regulated by the Academy.
90. The final movie in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, won every category it was nominated for (11).
91. Roma (2018) was the first streaming-led film to win major Oscars.
92. Even a nomination can cause a major upswing in a movie’s box office performance, especially when it comes to Best Picture nominees.
93. Over the years, the awards ceremony has been held in April, March, February, even May.
94. Satyajit Ray’s Honorary Oscar in 1992 for lifetime achievement was accepted by him from his hospital bed in Kolkata.
95. After many years of lobbying, 2026 marks the long-fought-for debut of a brand-new category: Best Casting. Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and Sinners are the films nominated for this first-time award.
96. The Academy introduced its first generative AI rules last year, stating that AI will neither help nor harm a film’s nomination chances, but the degree of human creative authorship will be considered when choosing winners.
97. Ryan Coogler’s vampire story Sinners made Oscars history this year by landing 16 nominations.
98. Starting 2029, YouTube will hold exclusive global rights to stream the Oscars for five years, ending a decades long partnership the Awards had with ABC.
2. In sharp contrast, between 3,300 and 3,400 people are expected to attend today’s event at the Dolby Theatre.
3. Back in 1929, the winners were shared under embargo a whole three months before the ceremony through the press.
4. A movie with sound, The Jazz Singer, won a special award at the first ceremony, with all other winners being silent movies.
5. The honour is officially named the Academy Award of Merit, while Oscar is the nickname given to the statuette.
6. According to folklore, Academy librarian Margaret Herrick remarked that the statuette resembled her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.
7. The Academy didn’t adopt the nickname officially until 1939.
8. These days, the statuettes are solid bronze and plated in 24-carat gold.
9. In the early days, they were made from a tin based alloy, Britanium.
10. Cedric Gibbons, an art director, designed the statuette.
11. Over the next several years, Gibbons would go on to win 11 Oscars himself, for Art Direction.
12. It takes the New York-based foundry, Polich Tallix, three months to make around 50 statuettes that are needed for the ceremony.
13. During World War II, due to a metal shortage, the Oscar statues were made of painted plaster for about three years.
14. Following the war, the Academy invited recipients to redeem the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones.
15. After Bette Davis was snubbed for Of Human Bondage in 1935, critics accused the voting process as being opaque. To restore credibility, an external firm, PwC, was hired.
16. The 14th Academy Awards saw the traditional pomp scaled down due to the American entry into World War II.
17. In 1949, five major film companies announced the discontinuation of their annual subsidy to the Academy, threatening the funding of the awards.
18. Between 1947 and 1955, the Academy honored foreign films with special or honourary non-competitive awards.
19. It was not until 1953 that the ceremony would be broadcast on TV.
20. In 1956, The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (now known as Best International Feature Film) was officially introduced.
21. Since 1951, Oscar winners cannot sell or transfer their trophies without first offering them back to the Academy for a symbolic sum of $1.
22. The rule extends to the heirs of Oscar winners too, meaning even they can’t resell the statuettes.
23. Therefore, only pre 1951 Oscars are available for collectors, and these are highly sought after.
24. In 1993, Vivien Leigh’s family auctioned her Best Actress award for Gone With The Wind for $563,000.
25. In 1999, Michael Jackson purchased the 1939 Best Picture Oscar for Gone With The Wind for $1.5 million.
26. In 2012, a collection of 15 statues sold for over $3 million.
27. Orson Welles’s award for Citizen Kane (1941) sold for over $800,000.
28. Since 2010, winners can get their names engraved at the ‘engraving bar’ at the Governor’s Ball, the official Oscars after party.
29. The first ceremony gave out two Best Picture awards, the second category named ‘Best Unique and Artistic Picture’.
30. The Academy introduced a special Juvenile Oscar in 1935, with a miniature statuette awarded to outstanding child performers.
31. Shirley Temple was the first recipient of this award. She was aged just six when she won it.
32. The last recipient was Hayley Mills in 1961.
33. Walt Disney holds the record for most Oscars: He won 22 competitive awards.
34. Disney also holds the record for ..
35. The only movie ever to receive awards two consecutive years was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
36. It won Best Music in 1938, and won a Special Academy Award in 1939.
37. The second award, in 1939, consisted of one normal statuette and seven miniature Oscars.
38. The idea of a full-sized Oscar statuette along with seven smaller ones came from film director Frank Capra.
39. The first non-English Best Picture winner was Parasite (2019).
40. The first woman nominated for Best Director was Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties (1977).
41. In 1960, Ben-Hur became the first film to win 11 Oscars.
42. Midnight Cowboy (1969) is the only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture.
43. The Godfather II is the first sequel to win Best Picture.
44. For The Godfather, three actors (James Caan, Robert Duvall, Al Pacino) were nominated for the Best Supporting Actor award. None of them won.
45. A streaker ran naked across the stage during the 1974 awards ceremony.
46. Daniel Day-Lewis is the only actor with three Best Actor wins (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln).
47. Among women, Katharine Hepburn holds the record for four acting Oscars (Morning Glory, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, On Golden Pond).
48. Meryl Streep holds the record for most acting nominations (17 for Best Actress and four for Best Supporting Actress).
49. In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director.
50. Tatum O’Neal remains the youngest acting winner (age 10) in 1974.
51. Anthony Hopkins is the oldest acting winner (age 83).
52. The shortest performance to win an Oscar was Beatrice Straight in Network, who had about five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time.
53. Christopher Plummer is the oldest nominee for acting (aged 88), for All the Money in the World.
54. John Williams is the oldest Oscar nominee in any category, at age 90, after receiving his 53rd Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.
55. Williams, incidentally, has been nominated across seven different decades.
56. Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for Best Director, but never won.
57. The only Oscar Stanley Kubrick won was for Best Visual Effects.
58. In the initial days, there used to be a Best Assistant Director category. It lasted from 1933 to 1937.
59. The category was discontinued because the Academy said assistant directors’ work had too much overlap with directing.
60. A Best Dance Direction category existed from 1935 to 1937.
61. Dance direction disappeared as musicals became less central to filmmaking.
62. Hattie McDaniel became the first Black Oscar winner in 1940. She won for her role in Gone with the Wind.
63. Because of segregation laws, McDaniel had to sit at a separate table in the ballroom.
64. Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor award in 1973 in protest of the ill treatment of Native Americans by the film industry.
65. Both Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro won for playing the same character, Vito Corleone, in The Godfather and The Godfather II.
66. The 1968 ceremony was postponed for two days due to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
67. Barbra Streisand tied with Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress in 1969, the only instance where an acting award was shared, with two recipients getting the same number of votes.
68. When Charlie Chaplin received an Honorary Oscar in 1972, it marked Chaplin’s return to the US after 20 years away, after he was labelled as a communist at the height of the Cold War.
69. Chaplin was given a 12-minute standing ovation, the longest in Oscar history.
70. Mary J Blige made Oscar history by being the first person to be nominated for both an acting award and Best Original Song.
71. James Dean is the only actor with two posthumous acting nominations.
72. Oscar speeches are normally limited to 45 seconds these days, before the music starts.
73. The clock starts from the moment the winner reaches the microphone.
74. In 2017, a mix up between La La Land and Moonlight happened because presenters were given the wrong envelope by PwC accountants.
75. When Parasite won best picture, the producers shut the lights off after two-and-a-half minutes.
76. The longest speech ever (six minutes) is believed to have been by Greer Garson, who won best actress in 1943.
77. The longest speech in recent history was by Adrien Brody.
78. The red carpet is over 900 feet of red-colored filament nylon pile carpeting.
79. To qualify for the awards, movies must complete a commercial run of at least seven consecutive days in one of six US cities with three shows daily.
80. These cities include Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago and Miami.
81. At least one of those screenings should begin between 6 pm and 10 pm.
82. To ensure that the Oscar venue hall always looks full on TV, seat fillers move in among the audience and take their place whenever people in the crowd need a break.
83. Bhanu Athaiya, the first Indian to win an Oscar for Gandhi (1984), was also the costume designer for Lagaan (2001), which received a nomination.
84. The Scientific and Technical Awards, separate from the main ceremony, have gone to inventors of cameras, CGI software, even motion capture systems.
85. The Academy’s membership being overwhelmingly male and white led to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy a decade ago.
86. Since then, between 2016 and 2020, the Academy doubled the number of women and minority members.
87. The turn of the century came with controversies over how producers like disgraced Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein were campaigning for Oscars.
88. Saving Private Ryan allegedly lost the 1999 Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love because of Weinstein’s influence ops.
89. Campaigning rules are now tightly regulated by the Academy.
90. The final movie in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, won every category it was nominated for (11).
91. Roma (2018) was the first streaming-led film to win major Oscars.
92. Even a nomination can cause a major upswing in a movie’s box office performance, especially when it comes to Best Picture nominees.
93. Over the years, the awards ceremony has been held in April, March, February, even May.
94. Satyajit Ray’s Honorary Oscar in 1992 for lifetime achievement was accepted by him from his hospital bed in Kolkata.
95. After many years of lobbying, 2026 marks the long-fought-for debut of a brand-new category: Best Casting. Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and Sinners are the films nominated for this first-time award.
96. The Academy introduced its first generative AI rules last year, stating that AI will neither help nor harm a film’s nomination chances, but the degree of human creative authorship will be considered when choosing winners.
97. Ryan Coogler’s vampire story Sinners made Oscars history this year by landing 16 nominations.
98. Starting 2029, YouTube will hold exclusive global rights to stream the Oscars for five years, ending a decades long partnership the Awards had with ABC.
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