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Oscar Facts and Trivia

This Year's Awards

This year's Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 23 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, telecast on ABC-TV. Actor/comedian Billy Crystal will once again host the awards (which is cool with me, since I think he does an awesome job).

In terms of nominations, James Cameron's Titanic scored the most this year, with 14 separate nods. This ties the previous record set by Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve in 1950. Eve picked up 6 statuettes on Oscar night. Here's the entire breakdown, by film:

Titanic: 14 nominations

L.A. Confidential: 9 nominations

Good Will Hunting: 9 nominations

As Good as it Gets: 7 nominations

Jack Nicholson, nominated for Best Actor for his performance in As Good As It Gets, became the most-nominated actor in the history of the Oscars with 11 career nominations. He had previously tied Lawrence Olivier's career record with 10 nominations, and still trails the all-time record set by Katharine Hepburn with 12 career nominations. Woody Allen became the most-nominated screenwriter in Oscar history, with his nomination for Deconstructing Harry bumping his career total to 13 nominations.

Historical Trivia

When was the first Oscar ceremony held, and where?

The first Oscars ceremony was held on May 19, 1929, at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. However, the winners had been announced months earlier, on February 18, 1929. It took only five minutes to distribute the first Oscars.

Has an animal ever been nominated for an Academy Award?

Yes--sort of. In 1984, a "P.H. Vazak" received a nomination for Best Screenplay for his writing on Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. "Vazak" was actually the name of a Hungarian sheepdog owned by screenwriter Robert Towne, who was so upset by the hiring of another writer to perform rewrites on his script that he gave his screen credit to his dog rather than himself. Thus, a presumably illiterate dog recieved a screenwriting nomination.

Has there ever been nudity in an Academy Awards telecast?

But of course! How could one forget the wild stunt of Robert Opal, a young man who ran across the stage of the 1973 Oscars naked just as David Niven was attempting to introduce Elizabeth Taylor? The orchestra quickly improvised a version of "Sunny Side Up," and Niven commented to the crowd, "Just think--the only laugh that man will probably ever get is for stripping and showing off his shortcomings." In the wake of his famous "streak," Opal spent several years as a minor celebrity on the talk-show circuit before being found murdered in his San Francisco sex shop.

What's that story about the Indian accepting the award for Brando?

I'm glad you asked. When Marlon Brando was announced as the winner of the 1972 Best Actor Oscar for his work in The Godfather, he did not appear on stage to accept his statuette. Instead, a woman in Apache costume took the podium on his behalf. She was Sacheen Littlefeather, president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, and she turned down the award for Brando, saying that she would explain why but she had been forbidden to read her 15-page speech. It was later discovered that Littlefeather was in fact an actress named Maria Cruz, who had been selected "Miss American Vampire of 1970."

Sources: Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes; Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar

Questions? Comments? Great thoughts?

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