148 Fun Facts About Oscars

The first Academy Awards, a private dinner in May 1929, was held at which Los Angeles venue?

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel's Blossom Room hosted the black-tie dinner on 16 May 1929, with tickets at $5; unlike every ceremony since, it was never broadcast on radio or television.

Why was there no suspense at the first Oscars in 1929?

Winners were already announced three months before the 1929 dinner, so the statuettes were handed over in a matter of minutes; from the second ceremony on, nothing was announced in advance.

Which film won Outstanding Picture, the forerunner of Best Picture, at the very first Academy Awards?

Wings, a First World War flying epic, won Outstanding Picture while Sunrise took a separate 'Unique and Artistic Picture' prize; a year later the Academy dropped that award and ruled Wings' the top honour.

What did the Academy start doing in 1941 after the LA Times printed the Oscar winners early in 1940?

Using a sealed envelope began in 1941: until then the results were handed to newspapers in advance, and in 1940 the Los Angeles Times printed the winners before the ceremony had begun.

Which accounting firm and its predecessor have certified the Academy Awards votes since 1935?

PricewaterhouseCoopers and its forerunner Price Waterhouse have counted the ballots since 1935; after a partner handed over the wrong card in 2017's Best Picture mix-up, both accountants on duty were taken off the show.

What do the spokes on the reel of celluloid beneath the Oscar statuette's feet stand for?

The Academy's original branches were actors, directors, producers, technicians and writers, one spoke each; the Academy has since grown to well over a dozen branches, but the reel still has five spokes.

Which actress told the 1985 Oscars audience 'you like me' as she accepted her second Best Actress award?

Sally Field, winning for Places in the Heart, actually said 'I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!'; the line is usually misquoted as 'You really like me!'

A wartime metal shortage forced the Academy to make its statuettes out of what for three years?

Wartime Oscars were painted plaster. Afterwards the Academy invited those winners to trade the plaster figures in for proper gold-plated metal ones.

A winner wanting to sell an Oscar must first offer it back to the Academy for what sum?

$1 is all the Academy must pay under the agreement winners have signed since the early 1950s, so only older statuettes reach auction: Michael Jackson paid $1.54 million for Gone with the Wind's Best Picture Oscar.

George C. Scott refused the Best Actor Oscar, calling the ceremony a 'meat parade', for which 1970 film?

Patton won Scott the award for playing the general, but he stayed away from the 1971 ceremony and refused the statuette, saying the contest between actors was demeaning.

Marlon Brando refused his 1973 Best Actor award as a protest against what?

Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans was his target: Brando boycotted the 45th ceremony and sent activist Sacheen Littlefeather on stage to turn the statuette down for him.

Which film made Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win Best Director?

The Hurt Locker won Bigelow the award at the 2010 ceremony, where the nominees she beat included her ex-husband, the director of Avatar; her film took Best Picture from his as well.

Which film was the first of only three to sweep the Oscars' so-called Big Five categories?

It Happened One Night won all five of its nominations, Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, for 1934, and nothing matched the sweep for 41 years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

For which 1963 film did Sidney Poitier become the first Black man to win Best Actor?

Lilies of the Field won Poitier the award at the 1964 ceremony for playing a handyman who builds a chapel for refugee nuns; it was 38 years before another Black actor won Best Actor.

Which George Bernard Shaw play, adapted for the screen in 1938, brought him an Academy Award?

Pygmalion won Shaw the screenplay award for Gabriel Pascal's 1938 film, an honour he is said to have brushed off as an insult from people who had barely heard of him; he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Which two films share the record for the most Oscar wins with 11 each, alongside Ben-Hur?

Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King each won 11 Oscars, matching Ben-Hur; The Return of the King won every category it was entered in, without a single acting nomination.

Who holds the record for the most competitive Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22?

Walt Disney won 22 competitive Oscars from 59 nominations; for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Academy added an honorary award made up of one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones.

Which actress holds the record for the most Academy Awards for acting, with four?

Katharine Hepburn won four Best Actress Oscars across 48 years without once turning up to collect; her only appearance at the ceremony, in 1974, was to present an award to a producer friend.

Who is the youngest person ever to win a competitive Academy Award?

Tatum O'Neal was ten when she won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon, opposite her father Ryan; Shirley Temple had been honoured at six, but with a miniature Juvenile Award outside the competition.

Anthony Hopkins became the oldest Best Actor winner for which 2020 film about dementia?

The Father won Hopkins the award at 83, for playing a man losing his grip on reality; he was not at the ceremony, and sent his thanks afterwards in a video from his home country, Wales.

Which film was the first not in the English language to win Best Picture?

Parasite won four Oscars in 2020; weeks earlier its director Bong Joon Ho had told an awards audience that getting over 'the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles' would open up many more great films.

Who became the first Black woman to win Best Actress, at the 2002 Oscars?

Halle Berry won for Monster's Ball and tearfully dedicated the award to 'every nameless, faceless woman of colour' who now had a chance; as of 2026 no other Black woman has won it.

Who was the first African American to win an Academy Award, taking Best Supporting Actress in 1940?

Hattie McDaniel won for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, but the hotel hosting the ceremony barred Black guests, so she was seated at a small table by the wall, apart from her co-stars.

Which film actually won Best Picture in 2017 after La La Land was wrongly announced?

Moonlight won Best Picture at the 89th awards after presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed a duplicate of the Best Actress card and read out La La Land.

Who won Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once at the 2023 Oscars?

Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian winner of Best Actress, was 60 and told the audience: 'Ladies, don't let anybody tell you you are past your prime'; her film won seven Oscars in all.

Oppenheimer won seven Oscars in 2024, including Best Director for whom?

Christopher Nolan had never won an Oscar before Oppenheimer, which took seven of its thirteen nominations; his one earlier directing nomination, for Dunkirk six years before, had lost.

Heath Ledger won a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing which character?

Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight at the February 2009 awards, thirteen months after his death in January 2008; his family accepted the statuette.

Which film composer is the second most Oscar-nominated person ever, with 54 nods as of 2026?

John Williams has 54 nominations, more than any other living person, but only five wins: Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler's List, the last of them three decades ago.

The Oscar statuette depicts a knight rendered in which artistic style?

The Oscar is an Art Deco knight, a stylised, streamlined figure gripping a crusader's sword and standing on a reel of film, in the geometric style fashionable when it was designed in 1928.

The first televised Oscars were split between Hollywood and which other city?

New York hosted a second stage with its own hosts in 1953, the first ceremony held in two places at once; Shirley Booth accepted her Best Actress award there, a continent away from the main show.

Which film beat Brokeback Mountain to Best Picture in a major upset at the 2006 Oscars?

Crash, an ensemble drama about race in Los Angeles, took Best Picture even though Brokeback Mountain had led the nominations and its director Ang Lee had just won Best Director.

Which Kevin Costner western beat Goodfellas to Best Picture at the 1991 Oscars?

Dances with Wolves won seven Oscars from twelve nominations, including Best Director for Costner on his first film behind the camera; Goodfellas went home with a single award.

Kim Basinger won Best Supporting Actress for playing a Veronica Lake look-alike in which film?

L.A. Confidential won Basinger the award as Lynn Bracken, a call girl styled after the 1940s star; the film turned only one other of its nine nominations into a win, for its screenplay.

Which former child star of The Goonies won Best Supporting Actor in 2023?

Ke Huy Quan, also Short Round in Temple of Doom, had given up acting for almost twenty years, working as a stunt coordinator and assistant director, before Everything Everywhere All at Once brought him back.

For which 1979 film did Meryl Streep win her first Oscar?

Meryl Streep won Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), her first Oscar; she rewrote Joanna's courtroom testimony herself after finding the script's version unsympathetic.

Who won Best Actress at the March 2024 ceremony for playing Bella Baxter in Poor Things?

Emma Stone won her second Best Actress Oscar for Poor Things, seven years after La La Land, and fought back tears as she told the audience that the back of her dress had broken.

Who won four Oscars in one night in 2025 for producing, directing, writing and editing Anora?

Sean Baker became the first person to win four Oscars for a single film, and used his directing speech to urge film-makers to keep making films for the big screen.

The 89th Academy Awards, scene of the La La Land Best Picture mix-up, were held at which venue?

The Dolby Theatre in Hollywood has been the Oscars' home since 2002; it was called the Kodak Theatre until the camera firm went bankrupt in 2012 and gave up the naming rights.

Anthony Hopkins won his first Best Actor Oscar, for a 1991 horror thriller, playing which character?

Hannibal Lecter appears for well under half an hour of The Silence of the Lambs, one of the briefest performances ever to win Best Actor.

Bette Davis claimed she named the statuette 'Oscar' after whom?

Her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, supposedly had a rear end that reminded her of the statue; she later withdrew the claim.

Academy librarian Margaret Herrick is said to have named the Oscar because it looked like which relative?

Her uncle Oscar is the most repeated origin story, though it has never been proved; Bette Davis and the columnist Sidney Skolsky each claimed the nickname too, and it was in general use by the mid-1930s.

Who won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars at the 1994 and 1995 ceremonies?

Tom Hanks won for Philadelphia and then Forrest Gump; his first speech, in which he thanked a gay former teacher, inspired the 1997 comedy In & Out.

Which network televised the Oscars for the first time in 1953, years before ABC took over?

NBC carried the first Oscar telecast on 19 March 1953, which drew the biggest audience television had yet seen, and kept the show until ABC took over with the 1961 ceremony.

Which platform was named in December 2025 as the Oscars' exclusive broadcaster from 2029?

YouTube takes over worldwide from the 101st ceremony in 2029 under a deal running through 2033, ending a run on ABC that had lasted without a break since 1976.

The 40th Academy Awards in 1968 were postponed for two days following whose assassination?

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968, and the Academy moved the ceremony from 8 to 10 April so that it would not be held on the eve of his funeral.

What did host Jimmy Kimmel offer as a prize for the shortest acceptance speech at the 2018 Oscars?

A jet ski, shown off on stage by Helen Mirren, went to costume designer Mark Bridges for his Phantom Thread speech; he posed on it with her at the end of the show.

Who became the first deaf performer to win an Oscar?

Marlee Matlin, 21, was handed the Best Actress award for Children of a Lesser God by her co-star William Hurt; no other deaf actor won until Troy Kotsur of CODA in 2022.

Which venue was named in March 2026 to host the Oscars from 2029 under a ten-year deal?

Peacock Theater, part of the L.A. Live complex downtown, takes over from the 101st ceremony, the same year the show changes broadcaster, ending the Oscars' decades in Hollywood itself.

Who was the first Best Actor winner, honoured for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh?

Emil Jannings was honoured for two films at once because the first awards covered a whole eligibility period; once talkies arrived, his thick German accent ended his Hollywood career.

Who won the first Best Actress Oscar, honoured for three films at once?

Janet Gaynor won for 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise together, because the first awards honoured a whole season's work; no actress has won for more than one film since.

Who tied with the star of The Lion in Winter for the 1969 Best Actress Oscar, the category's only tie?

Barbra Streisand, winning for her film debut in Funny Girl, looked down at the statuette and greeted it with her opening line from the film: 'Hello, gorgeous!'

Who was the first person to win a posthumous Oscar in an acting category, for Network?

Peter Finch died of a heart attack in January 1977, two months before the ceremony, and his widow Eletha accepted the award for his 'mad as hell' anchorman Howard Beale.

Which comedian hosted or co-hosted the Oscars a record 19 times?

Bob Hope never won a competitive Oscar and made a running joke of it, calling the show 'Passover' at his house; the Academy gave him five honorary awards instead.

Which comedian has hosted the Oscars nine times?

Billy Crystal first hosted in 1990, and his ninth turn came in 2012, when he stepped in after Eddie Murphy pulled out; only one person has fronted the show more often.

The Oscar statuette was designed by Cedric Gibbons, chief art director at which Hollywood studio?

MGM's Cedric Gibbons sketched the figure in 1928 and the young sculptor George Stanley modelled it; Gibbons went on to win the statuette he had designed eleven times.

In 2016 the Academy went back to which core metal for its statuettes?

For decades the figures were Britannia metal, a pewter-like alloy plated in copper, nickel silver and 24-karat gold. The 2016 switch restored the original bronze core.

Which Steven Spielberg film lost all eleven of its Oscar nominations?

The Color Purple went 0 for 11, matching the record shutout of the 1977 ballet drama The Turning Point; Spielberg himself was left off the Best Director list although his film tied for the most nominations.

Which film set an all-time record with sixteen nominations at the 2026 Oscars?

Sinners, Ryan Coogler's vampire drama, broke a record of fourteen nominations that three films had shared, yet it won only four awards and lost Best Picture.

Which film won Best Picture at the 2026 Oscars, taking six awards in all?

One Battle After Another brought Paul Thomas Anderson his first Oscars, for picture, directing and adapted screenplay, after years of nominations for films such as There Will Be Blood.

Which new competitive category debuted at the 98th Academy Awards in 2026?

Best Casting arrived after decades of lobbying by casting directors; it was the first new category since Best Animated Feature in 2001.

Which new Oscar, announced in April 2025, will first be presented at the 100th ceremony in 2028?

Best Stunt Design follows a campaign that director David Leitch led on behalf of the stunt community; the first award will go to a film released in 2027.

Who won Best Actress at the 2026 Oscars for playing Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet?

Jessie Buckley became the first Irish winner of Best Actress, eighteen years after she finished runner-up on the BBC talent show I'd Do Anything.

Who hosted the Oscars in both 2025 and 2026?

Conan O'Brien was signed up for 2026 barely two weeks after his first show, and became the first host in consecutive years since Jimmy Kimmel in 2023 and 2024.

Who won Best Actress for Anora at the 2025 ceremony?

Mikey Madison was 25 and won as a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch's son, beating Demi Moore, who had been the favourite after taking the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award.

Which Woody Allen comedy beat Star Wars to Best Picture at the 1978 Oscars?

Annie Hall took Best Picture, although Star Wars won the most awards of the night with six, all of them in craft and music categories.

Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor in 2025 for which film?

A Real Pain, written and directed by co-star Jesse Eisenberg, sends two cousins on a Holocaust heritage tour of Poland; accepting, Culkin said he had no idea how he had got there.

Zoe Saldaña won her Oscar for playing a lawyer in which musical crime film?

Emilia Pérez led the 2025 field with 13 nominations, the most ever for a film not in English, but won only two awards: Saldaña's and Best Original Song.

Who hosted the 2002 Oscars, the longest ceremony ever at 4 hours 23 minutes?

Whoopi Goldberg's night also saw Woody Allen, who had never attended the Oscars, walk on as a surprise to introduce a tribute to films shot in his home city after the September 11 attacks.

Which film won Best Picture at the 1966 Oscars?

The Sound of Music won at the first Oscars broadcast in colour; its star Julie Andrews, who had won Best Actress a year earlier for Mary Poppins, lost this time to Julie Christie.

Which silent-film star was elected the Academy's first president when it formed in 1927?

Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling hero of silent adventures, also hosted the first awards dinner in 1929 and handed out the statuettes himself.

Which First World War film won Best Picture at the second of 1930's two Oscar ceremonies?

All Quiet on the Western Front won in November 1930, only seven months after the previous ceremony, because the Academy wanted its awards to follow more closely on the films they honoured.

The 1938 Academy Awards ceremony was pushed back a week because of what event?

A flood in Los Angeles, after days of storms, forced the first postponement in the awards' history; the disaster also led Army engineers to encase the Los Angeles River in concrete.

The 1981 Oscars ceremony was delayed a day after an assassination attempt on whom?

Ronald Reagan, a former actor and Screen Actors Guild president, had pre-recorded a greeting for the show; it was still played when the ceremony went ahead the following night.

Which Los Angeles landmark hosted the main 2021 ceremony during the pandemic?

Union Station, the city's main railway terminal, stood in for a theatre at the 93rd awards on 25 April 2021; about 10 million people watched, still the telecast's smallest audience as of 2026.

Which British actor was on stage when a streaker ran past at the 1974 Oscars?

David Niven watched Robert Opel run naked across the stage behind him, then quipped that the man's only laugh in life would come from 'showing his shortcomings'.

Which host's 2014 Oscars selfie was retweeted more than three million times?

Ellen DeGeneres handed the phone to Bradley Cooper, who took the shot; it overtook Barack Obama's 2012 victory photo as the most retweeted post to date, a coup for the show's sponsor Samsung.

Which 73-year-old winner dropped to the stage for one-armed push-ups at the 1992 Oscars?

Jack Palance had just won Best Supporting Actor for City Slickers, almost 40 years after his last nomination; a year later he opened the show by appearing to haul a giant Oscar statue on stage.

Which actor climbed over seat backs on his way to collect the 1999 Best Foreign Language Film award?

Roberto Benigni stood on the seat backs to applaud the audience before bounding to the stage; later that night Life Is Beautiful also won him Best Actor, in a film he had directed himself.

Will Smith won Best Actor for which film shortly after slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars?

King Richard cast Smith as the father of Venus and Serena Williams; he resigned from the Academy days later, and it then banned him from its events for ten years.

Who became the youngest Best Actor winner in history when he won at 29 in 2003?

Adrien Brody won for The Pianist, beating four previous Oscar winners, and startled the presenter with a kiss on stage; as of 2026 he is still the only Best Actor winner under 30.

At 80, who became the oldest Best Actress winner?

Jessica Tandy had created Blanche DuBois on Broadway four decades earlier, only to see the film role go to Vivien Leigh; her Oscar finally came for Driving Miss Daisy.

Which actor holds the record of three Best Actor wins, the most recent at the 2013 ceremony?

Daniel Day-Lewis won for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln; famed for staying in character throughout a shoot, he has twice retired from acting, once to train as a shoemaker in Italy.

Frances McDormand collected her third Best Actress Oscar for which film?

Nomadland made McDormand a three-time Best Actress winner, after Fargo and Three Billboards; also one of its producers, she howled like a wolf on stage when it won Best Picture.

Who is the only performer to win three Best Supporting Actor Oscars?

Walter Brennan won three of the first five supporting awards, a run often credited to film extras, who could vote in those years and backed a man who had been one of them.

Who was the first woman nominated for Best Director, for the 1975 film Seven Beauties?

Lina Wertmüller, the Italian director known for her white glasses, lost to John G. Avildsen for Rocky at the 1977 awards; she received an Honorary Oscar in 2019, four decades later.

Who became the second woman to win Best Director, at the 2021 ceremony?

Chloé Zhao, born in Beijing, won eleven years after Kathryn Bigelow; in China, news of her victory was censored online, reportedly over critical remarks she had made about the country years before.

Who was the first woman to win Best Director in a year when a different film took Best Picture?

Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog led the field with twelve nominations yet won only for her directing, the first film since The Graduate to take that award and nothing else.

Which Eminem track became the first hip hop song to win Best Original Song?

Lose Yourself, from 8 Mile, won in 2003 while Eminem, sure he had no chance, stayed at home asleep; he finally performed it at the Oscars as a surprise in 2020.

Which film is the only X-rated picture ever to win Best Picture?

Midnight Cowboy (1969), starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, won Best Picture while rated X and was re-rated R for a 1971 reissue; the X of the time is roughly today's NC-17.

Which 1932 winner is the only Best Picture champion not nominated in any other category?

Grand Hotel packed Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and both Barrymore brothers into one film, yet none of them was nominated; Garbo's 'I want to be alone' comes from it.

Which musical won eight Oscars but lost Best Picture?

Cabaret (1972) won eight awards, the most ever for a film without Best Picture, Bob Fosse's for directing among them; the top prize went to a gangster epic that took home only three.

What was the first sequel to win Best Picture?

The Godfather Part II (1974) was the first sequel to take Best Picture; Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor as the young Vito Corleone, a part Marlon Brando had already won Best Actor for two years earlier.

Which film won the very first Best Animated Feature Oscar?

DreamWorks' ogre beat Pixar's Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron at the 2002 ceremony. The category was created partly because of the surge of non-Disney animated releases.

Which was the first animated film ever nominated for Best Picture?

Beauty and the Beast was first shown unfinished to a film-festival audience, which gave it a standing ovation, before becoming one of 1992's five Best Picture nominees.

Rick Baker won the first-ever Best Makeup Oscar for which 1981 film?

An American Werewolf in London won at the 54th Academy Awards; the category was created partly after outcry over The Elephant Man's makeup going unrewarded the year before. Baker won seven makeup Oscars in all.

Which 2011 film was the first mostly silent Best Picture winner in more than 80 years?

The Artist, shot in black and white, was the first largely silent winner since the very first ceremony; its Jack Russell, Uggie, later had his paw prints set in cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Who was the first actor to win consecutive Best Actor Oscars, for Captains Courageous and Boys Town?

Spencer Tracy won for Captains Courageous and then Boys Town, playing Father Flanagan, the real and still-living founder of Boys Town, a part he said kept him awake at night with worry.

Which 1940 film is the only Best Picture winner directed by Alfred Hitchcock?

The Oscar went to producer David O. Selznick, not Hitchcock, who was nominated five times for directing and never won. Rebecca's only other award was for cinematography.

Which NBA star won an Oscar in 2018 for Dear Basketball, an animated short based on his retirement letter?

Kobe Bryant's win was the first Oscar for any professional athlete. Veteran animator Glen Keane directed the film and shared the award, his own first Oscar too.

Which actor introduced Frozen singer Idina Menzel as 'Adele Dazeem' at the 2014 Oscars?

John Travolta's slip became an instant meme. A year later Menzel got her own back on the same stage, introducing him as 'Glom Gazingo'.

Which Tom Hanks film beat both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption to the Best Picture Oscar?

Forrest Gump won six Oscars that night, including Best Picture. Pulp Fiction's only win from seven nominations was Best Original Screenplay.

Shortly before the 2000 Oscars, 55 statuettes were stolen in transit; where did Willie Fulgear find 52 of them?

In a trash bin at a Koreatown supermarket, nine days after the theft. The trucking firm paid Fulgear a $50,000 reward and the Academy invited him to the ceremony.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his first Oscar for playing fur trapper Hugh Glass in which survival film?

The Revenant ended a wait of more than two decades. DiCaprio's first nomination had come for playing a developmentally disabled boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

Which Steven Spielberg film lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love in one of the Oscars' biggest upsets?

Saving Private Ryan had been expected to win, and Spielberg did take Best Director. DreamWorks executives blamed the loss on Miramax's "overly aggressive campaigning".

Which James Bond theme became the first to win the Best Original Song Oscar, half a century into the series?

Skyfall, sung by Adele, won in 2013, the year after the film series turned 50. Adele said the first draft of the song was written in 10 minutes.

Which silent-film star returned from two decades of exile to a 12-minute standing ovation at the 1972 Oscars?

Charlie Chaplin's ovation is the longest in the Academy's history. He had been forced to leave the United States in 1952 after accusations of communist sympathies, and settled in Switzerland.

Which singer-songwriter gave his Best Original Song Oscar speech by satellite from Sydney, for 'Things Have Changed'?

Bob Dylan later added the Nobel Prize in Literature to his Oscar. George Bernard Shaw had been the first person to hold both a Nobel and an Academy Award.

Which streaming service became the first to win Best Picture, when CODA triumphed at the 2022 Oscars?

Apple TV+ had bought CODA for a festival-record $25 million after its Sundance premiere. The film was also the first Best Picture winner with predominantly deaf actors in its leading roles.

Martin Scorsese won his first Oscar for directing which Boston crime thriller, a remake of Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs?

The Departed won four Oscars, including Best Picture. Scorsese's first Best Director nomination had come more than 25 years earlier, for Raging Bull.

Which Woody Allen comedy beat Star Wars to Best Picture at the 1978 Oscars?

Annie Hall won four of the Big Five awards, missing only Best Actor. Star Wars took the bigger haul that night, with six Oscars and a special award.

Rocky's Best Picture win at the 1977 Oscars came at the expense of which Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro film?

Taxi Driver lost along with Network and All the President's Men. Sylvester Stallone had written Rocky's screenplay in just three and a half days.

Which actress exclaimed 'you like me!' while accepting her second Best Actress Oscar, for Places in the Heart?

Sally Field's line is usually misquoted as 'You like me, you really like me!' She later sent the moment up herself in a Charles Schwab commercial.

The Best Picture field doubled to ten nominees the year after which superhero film was left off the Oscar shortlist?

The Dark Knight's omission drew public criticism, and many commentators saw the expansion as a response, though the Academy never said so. Pixar's WALL-E had missed out the same year.

Who became the first woman to host the Oscars solo in 1994, three years after winning one herself?

Whoopi Goldberg was also the first African American to host the show solo. Her supporting win for Ghost had made her the second Black woman to take an acting Oscar.

Which former US vice president's climate slide show became the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth?

Al Gore joined director Davis Guggenheim on stage, though the statuette itself went to Guggenheim. Gore reckoned he had given the slide show more than 1,000 times.

Which documentary maker was both applauded and booed at the 2003 Oscars for attacking the Iraq War in his speech?

Michael Moore was accepting Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine, his film about American gun violence. The invasion had begun only a few days earlier.

Eddie Redmayne won the Best Actor Oscar for portraying which scientist in The Theory of Everything?

Stephen Hawking liked the film enough to lend it his own synthesised voice. Redmayne beat Benedict Cumberbatch, nominated the same year for playing Alan Turing.

Which singer wore a swan-shaped dress to the 2001 Oscars and mimed laying an egg on the red carpet?

Björk was nominated that night for a song from her film Dancer in the Dark. The dress, by Macedonian designer Marjan Pejoski, also appears on the cover of her album Vespertine.

Who won Best Actress as Nurse Ratched when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest swept the five top Oscars?

Louise Fletcher used sign language in her acceptance speech to thank her deaf parents. Her father had founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama.

Which 1941 film, often ranked the greatest ever made, won only the screenplay Oscar from its nine nominations?

Citizen Kane lost Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley. Its single win was shared by Orson Welles and his co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Stanley Kubrick never won Best Director; his only Oscar honoured the special visual effects of which film?

2001: A Space Odyssey won for pioneering techniques such as slit-scan photography and front-screen projection. Kubrick had conceived the film as a spectacle for the giant Cinerama screen.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won a screenwriting Oscar for which film about a Boston janitor gifted at mathematics?

Good Will Hunting made Affleck, at 25, the youngest screenwriting winner the Oscars had seen. Robin Williams also won, as Best Supporting Actor.

Who became the first person to win Oscars for both acting and screenwriting, the latter for Sense and Sensibility?

Emma Thompson had already won Best Actress for Howards End. She also starred in the Jane Austen adaptation she wrote, as the sensible sister Elinor Dashwood.

Which Lawrence of Arabia star received eight Best Actor nominations without ever winning a competitive Oscar?

Peter O'Toole's first nomination came for Lawrence of Arabia and his eighth for Venus, 44 years later. The Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in between.

Which actor was the first man to reach 12 acting Oscar nominations, winning three times along the way?

Jack Nicholson's 12 nominations run from Easy Rider to About Schmidt: eight for Best Actor and four for supporting roles.

Which actor co-hosted the 2011 Oscars with Anne Hathaway on a night when he was also up for Best Actor?

James Franco was nominated for 127 Hours. No host had been a nominee at the same ceremony since Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee in 1987.

Who became the first deaf performer to win an Oscar, taking Best Actress at 21 in her screen debut?

Marlee Matlin won for Children of a Lesser God. She was also the youngest Best Actress winner the Academy had ever chosen, and one of very few to win for a debut.

Who became the youngest Best Director winner at 32, for the musical La La Land?

Damien Chazelle's musical arrived with a record-tying 14 nominations and converted six of them.

Which child star presented the honorary Snow White Oscar, one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones, in 1939?

Shirley Temple was 10 at the time. She already owned a miniature statuette herself, the special juvenile award she had received in 1935.

Which actor sang 'Proud Mary' with Snow White in the heavily criticised opening number of the 1989 Oscars?

Rob Lowe duetted with Eileen Bowman, who was dressed as the fairy-tale princess, on a version with lyrics rewritten to be about the film industry.

Which Lost in Translation writer-director became a third-generation Oscar winner, after her father and grandfather?

Sofia Coppola won Best Original Screenplay, following her composer grandfather Carmine and director father Francis Ford Coppola. Her cousin Nicolas Cage has a Best Actor Oscar too.

Which actress beat her own sister, Olivia de Havilland, to the Best Actress Oscar for Hitchcock's Suspicion?

Joan Fontaine is the only performer to win an acting Oscar in a Hitchcock film. De Havilland later won two of her own, making them the only siblings with lead-acting Oscars.

Which Italian star won Best Actress for Two Women, the first acting Oscar for a foreign-language performance?

Sophia Loren played Cesira for director Vittorio De Sica. The same role had already won her the best performance prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Judi Dench won Best Supporting Actress for about eight minutes on screen as which monarch in Shakespeare in Love?

Elizabeth I won Dench the award despite the tiny role. On stage she joked that, for eight minutes on screen, she should only get a little bit of the statuette.

Which 11-year-old won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her film debut in The Piano?

Anna Paquin, born in Winnipeg and raised in Wellington, had never acted on screen before the New Zealand-set drama.

Which cinematographer finally won an Oscar on his 14th nomination, for Blade Runner 2049?

Roger Deakins had gone home empty-handed 13 times since his first nomination, for The Shawshank Redemption. A second win followed two years later for 1917.

Which 1990 epic, with much of its dialogue in Lakota, became the first Western in six decades to win Best Picture?

Dances with Wolves was the first Western to take the top prize since Cimarron in 1931. Its seven Oscars set a record for the genre.

Which war veteran, who had lost both hands, won two Oscars for one role in The Best Years of Our Lives?

Harold Russell took Best Supporting Actor plus an honorary award, the only time two Oscars have gone to one performance. In 1992 he sold the competitive statuette at auction for $60,500.

Which actress won an Oscar for playing a man, Billy Kwan, in The Year of Living Dangerously?

Linda Hunt was the first person to win an Oscar for playing a character of the opposite sex. She took Best Supporting Actress for Peter Weir's adaptation of the novel.

Which Oscar category was presented only at the first ceremony, before talking pictures made its craft redundant?

Best Title Writing honoured the intertitles of silent films and went to Joseph Farnham. It was never given again once the talkies took over.

Which director rushed up for an Oscar in 1934, only to learn the host meant a rival with the same first name?

Frank Capra ran to the podium when host Will Rogers announced 'Come up and get it, Frank!' The winner was Frank Lloyd, for Cavalcade.

Which director of The Grapes of Wrath won a record four Best Director Oscars yet none for his famous Westerns?

John Ford won for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. His Westerns, Stagecoach and The Searchers among them, never brought him the directing prize.

Which composer of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly won his first competitive Oscar at 87, for The Hateful Eight?

Ennio Morricone became, at that time, the oldest person to win a competitive Oscar. The Academy had already given him an honorary award nine years earlier.

Which ventriloquist was given an honorary Oscar carved from wood for creating his dummy Charlie McCarthy?

Edgar Bergen's statuette is the only wooden Oscar the Academy has ever handed out. His daughter is the actress Candice Bergen.

Which Bernardo Bertolucci epic about China's Puyi won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture?

The Last Emperor went nine for nine. It was the first Western feature film that China's government authorised to shoot inside the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Which blacklisted screenwriter won an Oscar under the borrowed name 'Robert Rich' for The Brave One?

Dalton Trumbo had borrowed the name from a nephew of the film's producers. The Academy officially recognised him as the winner in 1975 and presented him with a statuette.

The only person named Oscar ever to win an Oscar wrote the lyrics for which Best Picture-winning musical?

The Sound of Music had lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, winner of two Best Original Song Oscars. He died before the stage hit was filmed, so he never saw it take Best Picture.

Which Danny Boyle film about a Mumbai game-show contestant won Best Picture at the 2009 Oscars?

Slumdog Millionaire won all but two of its ten nominations, including Best Director for Boyle. Its hero is a contestant on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?