With the Oscar season nearly here, as your watching the TV here are some interesting facts you can impress your friends with
The shortest Oscar ceremony ever was the first, held in 1929; it lasted only about 15 minutes as all the winners had been announced three months earlier.
The longest Oscar awards ceremony was in 2000, running for 4 hours and 16 minutes – beating a previous record by 16 minutes.
Bob Hope has hosted the Oscars 18 times; Billy Crystal is in second place with 8 times.
Tom Hanks is the youngest recipient of the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which he received in 2002 at age 45.
Kate Winslet is the only actress to receive four Oscar nominations before reaching the age of 30.
Gone with the Wind, at 3 hours and 56 minutes, was the longest film to have won a Best Picture Oscar; it was also the first film in color to win Best Picture.
Henry Fonda was first nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in 1941 for his role in The Grapes of Wrath but had to wait 41 years before he finally achieved a win in 1982 for his role in On Golden Pond. At 76, he is the oldest actor yet to have received the Best Actor award.
The oldest actress to win an Oscar is Jessica Tandy – at 81 she won the Best Actress Oscar in 1990 for her performance in Driving Miss Daisy.
Anthony Quinn’s performance as painter Paul Gaugin in Lust for Life (1956) is the shortest ever to win a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, his second Oscar. He was on screen for only 8 minutes. (He won a similar award in 1952 playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata!)
The shortest-ever winning performance for Best Supporting Actress belongs to Beatrice Straight, who won an Oscar in 1976 for her 5 minutes 40 seconds appearance as devastated wife Louise Schumacher in Network.
Dame Judi Dench won an Oscar in 1998 for less than 8 minutes of screen time playing Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.
The shortest-ever Best Actor Oscar-winning performance was awarded to David Niven in 1958, having appeared for only 15 minutes and 38 seconds in Separate Tables.
The second-shortest winning appearance was made by Anthony Hopkins in 1992, for less than 16 minutes of screen time as Dr Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
The fewest lines spoken by an Oscar-winning actress won Patty Duke a Best Actress in a Supporting Role portraying the deaf and blind Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. In the role she speaks only one word in the last scene: “Wah-wah” (for “water”).
The films with the most Oscar wins are Ben-Hur, Titanic and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, each winning 11 Oscars from 12, 14 and 11 nominations respectively.
William Wyler has directed more actors to Academy Award success than any other, with 34 nominations and 14 wins.
Jack Nicholson leads the Best Actor Academy Award category with wins from 11 nominations.
Meryl Streep had more Best Actress nominations than any other actress.
Shirley Temple is the youngest performer to receive an Academy Award; in 1934 she received a Special Award when she was only five years old.
Groucho Marx was the oldest Academy Award winner – in 1973 he received a Honorary Award at the age of 83.
Mutiny on The Bounty (1935) was the only film to have had three nominees for Best Actor Oscars (Charles Laughton, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone) but won only the Best Picture award.
The first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. The award went to Silence of the Lambs but Beauty and the Beast won 2 Oscars: Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
In 1937 Disney won a special Oscar for the first full-length animation: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
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