After 89 years of the Oscars being presented, the Academy Awards and their recipients have built up quite a number of records.
Here are some of the more interesting records that have been made and broken at the Oscars.
The Big Five
The Big Five consists of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay awards. So far, only three movies have won all five awards together.
It Happened One Night, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and most recently Silence of the Lambs, have won the ‘Big Five’. For the record, the Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalism drama came out 27 years ago, in 1991.
Best Director award on debut
There have been only five nominations for Best Director awards for women. In comparison, there have been five Best Director wins for debut films — all male. This puts this year’s Best Director nominee Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) in a unique position. If she wins, she will not only be the second woman to bag the award, but she will also be the first woman ever to win the award for her debut film.
Greta Gerwig accepts the award for best screenplay for ‘Lady Bird’ at the 33rd Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, March 3, 2018, in Santa Monica, California
The first woman to win Best Director was Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker.
Incidentally, there have been no Best Actor wins for debut films so far.
All the nominations
The only film in the history of Oscars to win every award it was nominated for (11 in total) was Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Kin g. Other overachievers, Ben Hur and Titanic , do have the same number of wins as LoTR, but they were nominated in more categories — 12 and 14 respectively.
Titanic has a counterpart in the most nominated film category — 2016’s La La Land . The Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone starrer had a whopping 14 nominations, but managed to win only six. The only other film that managed this feat was 1950’s All About Eve — 14 nominations but only six wins.
La La Land also holds another record, apart from being the other party in the infamous Best Picture mix-up last year . The film is also the only film to have had the maximum number of nominations without winning Best Picture.
Why John Williams should be a category of his own
This year, music composer John Williams broke a record — his own. Vanity Fair reports that the nomination for his work in Star Wars: The Last Jedi is actually his 51st Oscar nomination. The most number of awards anyone had ever been nominated for was 50 and that record was held by Williams last year.
Composer and conductor John Williams. File image.
But the 85-year-old has managed to win only five awards out of the 50 nominations: Fiddler on the Roof , Jaws , E.T. , Star Wars and Schindler’s List . His first nomination came in 1967 for Valley of the Dolls — meaning he’s clocked 51 Academy Award nominations in 51 years.
However, Williams, who has done the background score for all the eight Star War movies so far, may retire from the franchise after the ninth one is done. In an interview with Los Angeles radio station KUSC, Williams said nine might be “quite enough for me”. “We know J.J. Abrams is preparing one now that I will hopefully do next year for him. I look forward it. It will round out a series of nine, that will be quite enough for me,” Nerdist reported him as saying.
This year’s basket
Octavia Spencer, who has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Shape of Water , just equalled Viola Davis for the most nominated black actress spot. They both have three nominations each. Spencer also became the first black actress ever to get two consecutive Oscar nominations. She was nominated in the same category for Hidden Figures last year.
Jordan Peele, who has bagged a Best Director nomination for Get Out , is the first black filmmaker to do so.
Rachel Morrison, who has been nominated for Best Cinematography for Mudbound , is the first woman to ever be nominated for that award.
Christopher Plummer, nominated for All The Money In The World , is the oldest nominee at age 88, while Timothee Chalamet, nominated for Call Me By Your Name , is the youngest at 22.
Logan , which was nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, is the first live-action superhero movie to nominated for the Academy Awards.
