FTRC loves…The Oscars

This Sunday is Oscar night! The pinnacle of awards season, it’s always a free-for-all of good dresses, bad dresses, cringeworthy acceptance speeches (with the odd tear squeezed out for posterity) and some well-deserving Hollywood folks walking away with the film industry’s highest honour. We LOVE IT.

Let’s celebrate the 2012 ceremony with a journey back into Oscars history, shall we?

Let’s start with a nugget of 2012 trivia. Of this year’s 20 acting nominees, nine are Oscar newbs. The rest have a whopping 40 noms between them, but only two have ever won – those guys being Mezza Streep and George Clooney.

This year’s youngest nominee? Twenty-six-year-old Rooney Mara. The oldest is 82-year-old Max von Sydow of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Oscar statues weigh about half a stone and are more than a foot high (they look way smaller on TV!). They were named Oscar after Academy librarian Margaret Herrick’s uncle, to whom they apparently bear a resemblance. Was he naked and painted gold too?

The longest acceptance speech in history ran somewhere between five-and-a-half and seven minutes. We
imagine the reason no one knows is because they stopped listening after three. The giver of this epic speech? Greer Garson. Did she not hear the ‘shutup and get off the stage’ music?

Marlon Brando won an Oscar for The Godfather, but decided against turning up to collect it. He sent a model in Native American costume to do it instead. As you do…

Jack Palance, winning for City Slickers, celebrated in a rather unusual way. One-armed pushups, anyone?

What do you do when two of your Directing nominees have the same name? Not what Lloyd Bacon did in 1934, that’s for sure. Loz announced the winner by saying ‘come up and get it Frank.’ Frank Capra was pretty embarrassed when he headed for the stage, only to find rival Frank Lloyd was the actual winner. D’oh!
Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan to Best Picture. No, really. It did.

The most-awarded individual in Oscar history? Walt Disney, of course. We bet he needed a serious trophy cabinet for his 22 competitive and four honorary statues. (He was nominated 64 times.)

More record-breakers! The most-nominated actor ever is Jack Nicholson, with 12. He’s still pretty far behind serial nominee Meryl Streep, though. She picked up her 16th nom this year!

Seven different guys hold the record for most Actor wins. Does two count as a record? They’re all way behind most-awarded Actress winner Katharine Hepburn, anywhos. She got four.

The record for most Oscars won by a single film is 11, shared by Titanic, Ben-Hur and Lord of the Rings:
Return of the King. The LOTR threequel is the only film in Oscar history to win every award it was nominated for.

Less noteworthy? Return of the King is also the most successful film to never take home an acting statuette. It didn’t even score any nominations!

Are you a big Oscars fan? Will you be staying up super-late to check out this year’s ceremony?