90 Fun Facts About Awards

Why did the Michelin brothers hand their first guide to hotels and garages free to French motorists?

To sell more tyres: the free guide coaxed motorists into longer trips that wore out their rubber. Michelin began charging after André Michelin found copies propping up a workbench at a tyre shop.

Olympic gold medals must carry at least six grams of gold; the rest of the medal is mostly which metal?

An Olympic 'gold' is at least 92.5% silver under a thin plating of gold; the last solid-gold medals were handed out in 1912.

Which actress won a Razzie for All About Steve the night before taking the Best Actress Oscar?

Sandra Bullock turned up to collect her Worst Actress Razzie in person, wheeling in a wagon of All About Steve DVDs for the audience, then won Best Actress for The Blind Side the next night.

Which Canadian singer won the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland by a single point?

Céline Dion trailed the United Kingdom going into the final jury, but Yugoslavia gave Switzerland six points and Britain none, so 'Ne partez pas sans moi' won by one.

How did chemist George de Hevesy hide two Nobel medals from the Nazis in occupied Copenhagen?

He dissolved them in acid, aqua regia, and left the jar on a lab shelf; after the war the gold was precipitated out and the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck were recast from it.

France's Prix Goncourt, its most coveted literary prize, comes with a cheque for how much money?

The Goncourt cheque is a symbolic 10 euros; the real reward is the sales surge, and the jury still picks the winner over lunch at the Drouant restaurant in Paris.

The Fields Medal, awarded only to mathematicians under 40, carries the portrait of which ancient Greek thinker?

Archimedes is on the medal, which only under-40s can win; the rule cost Andrew Wiles one, since he completed his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem at 41 and was handed a special plaque instead.

The Golden Lion is the top prize at the world's oldest film festival, founded in 1932 in which city?

Venice's festival handed its best films a 'Mussolini Cup' from 1934 to 1942; the Golden Lion of St Mark, named for the winged lion that is the city's symbol, arrived in 1949.

Which novelist shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo after judges broke the no-split rule?

Margaret Atwood's The Testaments shared the prize with Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, defying a ban on ties brought in after the 1992 split between Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth.

Broadway's top theatre prize is nicknamed after which co-founder of the American Theatre Wing?

Antoinette Perry, known as Tony, helped found and lead the American Theatre Wing; at the first ceremony in 1947 there was no statuette, so winners took home a scroll and a keepsake such as a compact or money clip.

The Hugo Awards, science fiction's top prizes since 1953, hand winners a trophy shaped like what?

A rocket ship has topped every Hugo trophy but one; the first, in 1953, copied the hood ornament of an American car, and the awards take their name from Amazing Stories founder Hugo Gernsback.

Which American children's book award, named after an 18th-century London publisher, was the world's first?

The Newbery Medal, proposed in 1921, honours John Newbery, the London publisher who first made children's books a profitable trade; it is given by a division of the American Library Association.

Which physicist is the only individual to hold both an Ig Nobel, for levitating a frog, and a real Nobel Prize?

Andre Geim won the 2000 Ig Nobel for floating a frog in a magnetic field, then shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene, which he and Konstantin Novoselov first peeled from graphite with sticky tape.

London theatre's Olivier Awards hand winners a bust of Laurence Olivier as which Shakespearean warrior king?

The statuette shows Olivier as Henry V in his 1937 Old Vic production; the awards began in 1976 as the Society of West End Theatre Awards and took his name in 1984.

The BAFTA trophy, designed by sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe, takes the form of what?

A theatrical mask: Cunliffe made it for the Guild of Television Producers, so it began as a television trophy; the guild's 1958 merger with the British Film Academy created the body now called BAFTA.

Which act won the Mercury Prize, for British or Irish album of the year, in both 2001 and 2011?

PJ Harvey was on tour in Washington, D.C., when her first win was announced on 11 September 2001, the day of the attacks; as of 2025 nobody else had taken the prize twice.

Which fashion designer made the first of the Brit Awards' annual guest-designed statuettes in 2011?

Vivienne Westwood's statuette was part of a 2011 reboot of the Brits, which also moved the show from Earls Court to London's O2 arena.

Sweden's Polar Music Prize, first given to Paul McCartney in 1992, was founded by the manager of which band?

ABBA's manager Stig Anderson endowed the prize in 1989 with a donation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; the first laureates were Paul McCartney and the three Baltic states.

The MTV Video Music Awards trophy, a spacesuited astronaut, has officially been called what since 2017?

MTV renamed the 'moonman' the Moon Person in 2017; the figure comes from the channel's 1981 launch ident, which reused Apollo 11 footage.

For decades until a 2025 redesign, Kennedy Center Honors recipients wore what around their necks at the Washington gala?

A rainbow ribbon hung round each honoree's neck from the first Honors in 1978 until 2025, when a Tiffany redesign swapped it for a navy-blue strap holding a gold disc.

John F. Kennedy's Presidential Medal of Freedom replaced a 1945 Medal of Freedom created by which president?

Harry S. Truman's 1945 Medal of Freedom honoured civilian service in wartime; Kennedy's 1963 executive order turned it into the joint-highest civilian award, alongside the Congressional Gold Medal.

What did Time magazine crown 'Machine of the Year' for 1982, in place of its usual Man of the Year?

The personal computer took the 1982 cover to herald the dawn of the Information Age, an honour that began with aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and in 2006 went to 'You'.

Which 1955 film about a lonely Bronx butcher first won both the Palme d'Or and the Best Picture Oscar?

Marty, expanded from a 1953 television play, took the first Palme d'Or ever awarded; The Lost Weekend had earlier paired Cannes's old top prize, the Grand Prix, with Best Picture.

Which company has funded the Turing Award's $1 million prize, the 'Nobel of computing', since 2014?

Google bankrolls the $1 million prize alone, a fourfold rise from the $250,000 it had co-funded with Intel until 2013; the Association for Computing Machinery has given the award since 1966.

Whose keynote at the first Laureus World Sports Awards declared 'sport has the power to change the world'?

Nelson Mandela, the first patron of Laureus, gave the keynote in Monte Carlo on 25 May 2000, and the organisation adopted his speech as the philosophy behind its Sport for Good charity work.

The Masters champion may take the green jacket home for one year; where must it stay after that?

It must stay at Augusta National, where champions wear it only on the grounds; Gary Player took his home to South Africa after his 1961 win and had to promise never to wear it in public.

FIFA's Puskás Award, created in 2009 and first won by Cristiano Ronaldo, honours what each year?

The Puskás Award goes to the most beautiful goal of the year, and stars do not always win: in 2015 Wendell Lira of the small Brazilian club Goianésia beat Lionel Messi in the vote.

Which striker, later president of Liberia, became the first non-European to win the Ballon d'Or in 1995?

George Weah won in 1995, the year eligibility opened to players of any origin at European clubs, and through 2025 he remained the only African winner; he was Liberia's president from 2018 to 2024.

The World Cup's best-goalkeeper prize was the Yashin Award until 2006, honouring a keeper from which country?

Lev Yashin of the Soviet Union, the 'Black Spider' who played in dark kit and seemed to have eight arms, lent his name to the prize from 1994 to 2006; it is now the Golden Glove.

Who created and hosts The Game Awards, launched in 2014 to succeed the Spike Video Game Awards?

Geoff Keighley, a games journalist, put about $1 million of his own money into launching the show after years of working on the Spike awards.

Which British-born video game prizes, launched in 1983 and voted on by the public, are the longest-running?

The Golden Joystick Awards marked 50 years of gaming in 2021 by asking the public to pick the Ultimate Game of All Time, and voters chose Dark Souls.

In the Michelin Guide's own wording, a restaurant with three stars offers cooking that is 'worth' what?

A special journey is the top rung of the ladder: two stars are 'worth a detour', so the scale rates food by how far a driver should go out of the way for it.

The Bocuse d'Or, a biennial world chef championship named after Paul Bocuse, is held in which French city?

Lyon, the city where Paul Bocuse built his reputation, has hosted the contest at the Sirha hospitality fair since the first edition in January 1987.

Which restaurant, co-founded by chef René Redzepi, topped the World's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2010, 2014 and 2021?

Noma takes its name from the Danish words nordisk mad, 'Nordic food'; the Copenhagen restaurant was named best in the world in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Which American broadcasting honours, run by the University of Georgia, are named after one of its benefactors?

The Peabody Awards were conceived by broadcasters as radio's answer to the Pulitzers; the University of Georgia agreed to run them, and they took the name of its benefactor George Foster Peabody.

Which London body's Copley Medal, first given in 1731, is the world's oldest surviving scientific award?

The Royal Society first gave the Copley in 1731, funded by a £100 bequest from Sir Godfrey Copley to pay for experiments; Benjamin Franklin won it in 1753 for his work on electricity.

Which mathematics honour, handed out annually by the King of Norway, is named after a prodigy who died at 26?

The Abel Prize was first championed in the 1890s by fellow Norwegian Sophus Lie, once it emerged that Nobel's prizes would leave mathematics out, but the plan died with him and the prize only arrived in 2003.

Which science prizes, founded by Silicon Valley figures including Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, are worth three million dollars each?

The Breakthrough Prizes were set up to make scientists celebrities: co-founder Yuri Milner wants them as famous as film stars, in the hope of inspiring the next generation of researchers.

Jakob von Uexküll funded the 1980 launch of the Right Livelihood Award, the 'Alternative Nobel', by selling what?

He sold his stamp collection, worth about US$1 million, to endow the award, which has no ties to the Nobel Foundation despite the nickname.

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after a Russian dissident physicist, is awarded by which body?

The European Parliament created the prize in December 1988 in honour of Andrei Sakharov, who helped design his country's hydrogen bomb before becoming its best-known dissident and a Nobel Peace laureate.

Which British prime minister won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his histories and speeches?

Winston Churchill took the literature prize, not the peace prize: the Swedish Academy cited his historical and biographical writing and his brilliant oratory.

Which pop duo had their Best New Artist Grammy revoked in 1990 after it emerged they sang none of their hits?

Milli Vanilli only danced and lip-synced to vocals recorded by hired singers; their svengali Frank Farian had pulled the same trick with Boney M's frontman in the 1970s.

Which film was wrongly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars before Moonlight was named the real winner?

La La Land's team were already giving their speeches when the error surfaced: presenter Warren Beatty had been handed the envelope for Emma Stone's Best Actress win.

Which of J.K. Rowling's boy-wizard novels won the 2001 Hugo Award for Best Novel?

Goblet of Fire, the fourth book of the seven, is the only one in the series to win science fiction's best-known prize.

Which actor sent Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather in 1973?

Marlon Brando boycotted the ceremony in protest at Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans, so Littlefeather raised her hand to refuse the statuette on stage.

Whose acceptance speech did Kanye West interrupt on stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards?

Taylor Swift had just won Best Female Video when West took the microphone. Later that night Beyoncé, whose video he was championing, invited her back to finish the speech.

Which scientist is the only laureate to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry?

Marie Curie shared the 1903 physics prize with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, then won the 1911 chemistry prize alone for discovering radium and polonium.

Which children's TV network has staged the Kids' Choice Awards, decided by young viewers' votes, since the late 1980s?

Nickelodeon grew the show out of The Big Ballot, a 1987 segment on its movie review programme that was named for the ballots kids filled in.

Which American songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature but did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony?

Bob Dylan pleaded pre-existing commitments, then quietly collected his gold medal and diploma at a private meeting with the Swedish Academy the following April.

What mocking nickname is given to the very last player chosen in each year's NFL Draft?

Mr. Irrelevant is feted with a week of events in Newport Beach, California, and handed the Lowsman Trophy, which shows a player fumbling the football.

Which Ivy League school administers the Pulitzer Prizes, set up under newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer's will?

Columbia University was left the money to found a school of journalism as well as the prizes, which were first handed out in 1917, six years after the publisher died.

Which American honour, named after a Victorian English illustrator, goes to each year's best children's picture book?

The Caldecott Medal goes to the artist, not the writer, and its face shows a rider on a runaway horse, a scene taken from one of Randolph Caldecott's own book covers.

Which Salman Rushdie novel was voted the 'Best of the Booker' by the public in 2008, having first won in 1981?

Midnight's Children had already been named the Booker of Bookers in 1993, when the prize marked its 25th anniversary, so it has effectively won three times.

Which French philosopher declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying a writer should not become an institution?

Jean-Paul Sartre had written ahead asking to be taken off the list of nominees, but the letter went unread and the prize was announced anyway.

The Mystery Writers of America name their annual awards after which American pioneer of the detective story?

Edgar Allan Poe gives the prizes their nickname, the Edgars, which cover mystery writing for television, film and theatre as well as books.

Which novelist won the Booker Prize for both Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies?

Hilary Mantel became the first woman to win the Booker more than once; both novels follow Thomas Cromwell's rise to power at the Tudor court.

Which author of Beloved became, in 1993, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Toni Morrison was the first Black woman of any nationality to take the prize, decades after becoming Random House's first Black woman senior editor in fiction.

The Geisel Award for American beginning-reader books honours the children's author better known by which pen name?

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Seuss Geisel, and the bronze medal in his name goes to both the author and the illustrator of the year's most distinguished book for new readers.

Britain's Diagram Prize, begun to liven up the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair, goes each year to a book with the oddest what?

The title alone decides the Diagram Prize, a joke award that The Bookseller magazine has put to a public vote since 2000.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, run from California's San José State until 2025, rewarded the worst possible what?

An opening sentence was the whole entry: contestants wrote the first line of a deliberately awful imaginary novel, in tribute to the much-quoted opener of an 1830 Edward Bulwer-Lytton book.

Which composer of The Sound of Music became, in 1962, the first winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony?

Richard Rodgers completed the set two decades before it had a name: actor Philip Michael Thomas coined the acronym EGOT in late 1984.

Which South Korean thriller made Oscar history in 2020 as Best Picture's first winner not in the English language?

Parasite, directed by Bong Joon Ho, was also the first South Korean film to receive any Academy Award recognition at all.

Which comedian hosted the Academy Awards ceremony 19 times, more than anyone else, yet was never nominated for an Oscar?

Bob Hope turned his own empty trophy shelf into a running gag at the podium, though the Academy did give him four honorary awards over the years.

Which awards were founded and long run by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of overseas journalists?

The Golden Globes were sold in 2023 to Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge Industries, and the controversy-hit association was rebranded as a charitable foundation.

Which Mel Brooks comedy became a stage musical that won 12 Tony Awards in 2001, breaking a 37-year record?

The Producers, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, beat the ten Tonys of Hello, Dolly! and also set a record for single-day ticket sales after it opened.

Which comedian was slapped on stage by Will Smith at the 2022 Academy Awards while presenting a documentary prize?

Chris Rock carried on and presented the award. Smith won Best Actor within the hour, and the Academy later banned him from its events for ten years.

The Emmy Awards take their name from 'immy', early television engineers' slang for which piece of equipment?

A camera tube called the image orthicon was nicknamed the immy, and the word was later feminised to Emmy to suit the female figure on the statuette.

Which child star became the youngest competitive Oscar winner at age ten, acting opposite her father Ryan in 1973?

Tatum O'Neal won Best Supporting Actress for playing Addie Loggins, a part she was approached for at eight years old with no acting experience.

Which Hollywood studio founder won 22 Academy Awards, more than any other individual, from 59 nominations?

Walt Disney's run began with the cartoon Flowers and Trees, winner of the first Oscar ever given for an animated short, at the 1932 ceremony.

The Eisner Awards, American comics' top honours, have been presented every year since 1991 at which convention?

San Diego Comic-Con hosts the ceremony named after cartoonist Will Eisner, who was a regular at it himself until his death in 2005.

You Can't Do That on Television, a Canadian sketch show, gave the Kids' Choice Awards which messy trademark?

Slime, famously green, poured onto any cast member who admitted to not knowing something; since 2002 slimings have been staged as stunts at the awards.

Which voice of Kung Fu Panda's Po hosted the Kids' Choice Awards in 2006, 2008 and 2011?

Jack Black fronted the show three times; the record belongs to Rosie O'Donnell, who hosted eight times between 1996 and 2003.

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony for laughable research moved from MIT in 1995 to the Sanders Theatre at which university?

Harvard's Sanders Theatre became home to the spoof prizes, which are handed to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates.

Which naturalist's name is on the tongue-in-cheek awards for people who foolishly remove themselves from the gene pool?

Charles Darwin's natural selection is the joke: winners must die or sterilise themselves by their own actions, and anyone who takes an innocent bystander with them is disqualified.

Which rider earns the Tour de France's 'lanterne rouge', an unofficial distinction some have deliberately chased?

The last-placed finisher is named after the red lantern hung on the rear of a train, and the fame it brings has tempted riders to dawdle their way down to the spot.

In rugby's Six Nations Championship, the team that finishes bottom of the table is said to win which kitchen utensil?

The wooden spoon began as a real booby prize at Cambridge, where students presented one to the maths graduate with the lowest marks until 1909.

Which unofficial prize, handed out during the Cannes Film Festival, rewards the best performance by a canine?

The Palm Dog, begun in 2001 by Toby Rose, plays on the Palme d'Or and has gone to animated hounds and entire canine casts as well as lone stars.

Which internet honours, founded in 1996, are famous for limiting winners' acceptance speeches to just five words?

The Webby Awards rule has produced some famously terse and funny thank-yous, though a few winners have cheerfully blown through the limit.

Which HBO fantasy saga won 59 Primetime Emmy Awards across eight seasons, four of them for Outstanding Drama Series?

Game of Thrones even won an Emmy for its credits sequence, a three-dimensional map of the story's fictional world.

Which 1991 thriller was only the third winner of all 'Big Five' Oscars, after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

The Silence of the Lambs took picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay, a sweep first pulled off by the screwball comedy It Happened One Night.

Which annual honour, funded by the family behind Hyatt hotels, is often called the Nobel of architecture?

The Pritzker Prize was founded in 1979 by Jay Pritzker and his wife Cindy, and its first winner, Philip Johnson, was cited for 50 years of imagination and vitality.

Which science fiction and fantasy prizes are voted on by members of SFWA, the genre's professional writers' body?

The Nebula Awards are picked by working authors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, though a winner need not be a member or even an American.

Which novelist won Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction for both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys?

Colson Whitehead's second win, in 2020, made him only the fourth writer to take the fiction prize twice; the first book had also won the National Book Award.

Which author of The Remains of the Day, a Booker Prize winner, received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and moved to Britain with his parents at the age of five, later writing his prize-winning novels in English.

Australia's main television awards take their name from the middle name of which Scottish inventor?

John Logie Baird's name was put forward by entertainer Graham Kennedy, who had won the top award a year earlier, when it was simply called Star of the Year.

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for his work on what, not for relativity?

The photoelectric effect was the cautious choice: some physicists were sceptical of general relativity at the time, so the citation never mentioned it.

Which North Vietnamese negotiator refused the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded jointly with Kissinger?

Le Duc Tho, the first Asian to be awarded the prize, turned it down on the grounds that peace had not yet been established in Vietnam.

Which Swedish author became, in 1909, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Selma Lagerlöf went on to be the first woman admitted to the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the winner, and the first pictured on a Swedish banknote.

Which Wisconsin senator handed out a monthly Golden Fleece Award from 1975 to 1988 for squandering public money?

William Proxmire issued 168 of the mock awards, and a budget watchdog revived the idea in 2000 after giving him its own lifetime achievement award.

Which New Orleans novel won John Kennedy Toole a posthumous Pulitzer after his mother fought to get it published?

A Confederacy of Dunces reached print through the efforts of Thelma Toole and the novelist Walker Percy, who wrote its foreword, and went from cult classic to mainstream hit.