15 Fun Facts About Oscars Trivia

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

About 270 guests attended the dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on 16 May 1929. The Ambassador and the Biltmore did host the ceremony later, alternating between them from 1930 to 1943.

Roughly how long did that first Academy Awards presentation last?

Fifteen statuettes were handed out in a quarter of an hour. There was no suspense to draw out — the winners had been announced to the press three months earlier.

At the 1st Academy Awards there were two equal top prizes. Wings took Outstanding Picture; which film took the other, Unique and Artistic Picture?

F. W. Murnau's Sunrise won the Unique and Artistic Picture award, meant to honour a different but equally important kind of filmmaking. The Academy dropped the category the following year and declared Wings' award the higher honour retroactively.

In 1940 the Los Angeles Times printed the winners before the ceremony began. What did the Academy start doing the next year to stop that?

Through the 1930s results were simply handed to newspapers for publication at 11 pm on the night. After the Los Angeles Times jumped the gun in 1940, the Academy adopted the sealed envelope in 1941.

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

Price Waterhouse took on the count for the 7th Academy Awards in 1935, and its successor PricewaterhouseCoopers has certified the votes ever since.

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

The statuette stands on a reel with five spokes, one for each of the Academy's founding branches: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers and Technicians.

How tall is an Oscar statuette?

The statuette measures 13.5 inches (34.3 cm) and weighs 8.5 pounds — smaller in the hand than it looks on television.

A metal shortage during the Second World War 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.

Since 1950, a winner who wants to sell an Oscar statuette must first offer it back to the Academy for what sum?

The one-dollar buy-back clause is what keeps Oscars off the auction block. Refuse to sign it and the Academy simply keeps the statuette. Awards predating the rule have sold for six figures.

George C. Scott turned down the Best Actor award, calling the ceremony a "meat parade". Which 1970 role was it for?

Scott declined the award at the 43rd ceremony for playing the general in Patton. He was the second person ever to refuse an Oscar, after screenwriter Dudley Nichols in 1935.

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

Brando cited the film industry's discrimination against and mistreatment of Native Americans, and sent activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the 45th ceremony to deliver his statement in his place.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director. Which of her films earned it?

Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker, honoured at the 2010 ceremony. Lina Wertmüller had been the first woman merely nominated, for Seven Beauties in 1976, and Chloé Zhao became the first woman of colour to win, for Nomadland.

Only three films have swept the so-called Big Five categories. Which of them did it first?

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night took Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay in 1934. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest repeated the feat in 1975 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991; no other film has managed it.

Sidney Poitier became the first Black actor to win the Best Actor award. Which 1963 film was it for?

Poitier won for Lilies of the Field at the 1964 ceremony. Five years earlier, The Defiant Ones had made him the first African-American actor nominated in a lead role.

George Bernard Shaw was the first person to hold both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. Which of his plays, adapted for the screen in 1938, brought him the second one?

Shaw wrote the screenplay for Gabriel Pascal's 1938 Pygmalion and won for it, an honour he dismissed as an insult coming from Hollywood. He had taken the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.