Wow your friends, impress your colleagues, and shock yourself with your own vast knowledge of Oscar history, facts, trivia, and general useless information! Here's the who did what, when and all those why's you need to know about Oscar.....

By: Kindah Mardam Bey

Wow your friends, impress your collegues, and shock yourself with your own vast knowledge of Oscar history, facts, trivia, and general useless information! Here's the who did what, when and all those why's you need to know about Oscar.....

• Walt Disney has won more Oscars than anyone else. He was nominated for 64, and won 26!
• The actor or actress with the most Oscars is Katharine Hepburn, who starred in old-time classics like The Rainmaker and The African Queen. She won four best actress Oscars
• The youngest ever Oscar winner is actress Tatum O'Neal who was 10 when she won best supporting actress for the film Paper Moon
• Only three films have even won all top five Oscars - Best Film, Actor, Actress, Director and Writing. They are: It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Silence of the Lambs
• During World War II, the winners were given Oscar statues made of plaster instead of the usual golden ones, to mark the war effort
• The most Oscars ever won by a single film is 11. That's happened three times, with Ben Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
• The Return of the King is the only film ever to have won every single Oscar it was nominated for.
• The shortest Oscar ceremony in history was the first Oscars, in 1929. The awards portion of the evening lasted only about 15 minutes (shorter than some speeches take these days), since all the winners had been announced three months earlier.
• The longest awards in history was the 2001 (ceremony in 2002) awards which lasted approximately 256 minutes, beating the previous record by about 16 minutes.
• The First Film To Be Released On Video Before Winning Best Picture: The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)
• The Only Television Film To Be Adapted Into A Best Picture Winning Film: Marty (1955)
• The First Posthumous Oscar Winner: Sidney Howard, for the screenplay of Gone With The Wind (1939)
• The Only Twins To Win Oscars: Julius J Epstein and Philip G. Epstein shared the shared the Screenplay with Howard Koch for Casablanca (1943)
• The Only Oscar To Win An Oscar: Oscar Hammerstein II (Best Song: 1941, 1945) Two Families With Three Generations Of Oscar Winners: Walter Huston (Best Supporting Actor, The Treasure Of Sierra Madre, 1948), John Huston (Best Director, The Treasure Of Sierra Madre, 1948), Anjelica Huston (Best Supporting Actress, Prizzi's Honor, 1985)

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• Carmine Coppola (Best Original Dramatic Score, The Godfather: Part II, 1974), Francis Ford Coppola (Best Original Screenplay, Patton, 1970; Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather, 1972; Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, The Godfather: Part II, 1974), Nicolas Cage A.K.A. Nicolas Coppola: Francis Ford Coppola's nephew (Best Actor, Leaving Las Vegas, 1995), Sophia Coppola Daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Grandaughter of Carmine
• The Only Women Nominated As Best Director: Lina Wertmuller, Seven Beauties (1976), Jane Campion, The Piano (1994), Sophia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003)
• Until 1941, the Oscar results were made available to newspapers ahead of being announced at the ceremony so they could be included in the next day's editions. Several nominees found out whether they had won by nipping to the press room during the show, so the procedure was abandoned in favour of the sealed envelopes.
• The first colour film to win Best Picture was Gone With The Wind in 1940; the last black-and-white film to receive the award was Schindler's List in 1994
• Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor award for The Godfather in 1973 in protest against Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. He asked activist ‘Sacheen Littlefeather' (an actress whose real name was Maria Cruz) to accept on his behalf. Littlefeather was booed, despite whittling her 15-page speech down to 45 seconds at the insistence of the organisers.
• Two actors directed themselves to a Best Actor Oscar: Laurence Olivier for Hamlet in 1948 and Roberto Benigni for Life Is Beautiful in 1997.
• In consecutive years, two actresses were nominated for playing the same character: in 1998 Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were both shortlisted for playing Rose in Titanic, while Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett played Elizabeth I in 1999 (in Shakespeare In Love and Elizabeth respectively.
• When her co-star Bette Davis was nominated for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? in 1963, a snubbed Joan Crawford wrote to the other Best Actress nominees and offered to accept awards on their behalf if they couldn't attend the ceremony. Anne Bancroft won on the night for The Miracle Worker, Crawford accepted for her, and Davis was left fuming.
• The 1974 ceremony was interrupted when one Robert Opal streaked across the stage. "Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings," quipped co-host David Niven. Five years later, Opal was murdered in his San Francisco sex shop during a robbery.
• Only three films have won in every category they were nominated in: Gigi in 1959 and The Last Emperor in 1988, both picking up nine awards, and The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, which went 11 for 11. The Turning Point and The Color Purple are the biggest losers, missing out on all 11 categories they were nominated in at the 1978 and 1986 ceremonies.
• The longest acceptance speech in Oscar history was delivered by Greer Garson in 1943 upon winning Best Actress for Mrs Miniver. The London-born actress rambled on for five minutes and 15 seconds before bursting into tears, thus becoming the Gwyneth Paltrow of her day. She was mocked mercilessly afterwards.
• Several married couples have both won Oscars, but only one Oscar-winning child has thus far been born to two award-winning parents. The daughter of Vincente Minnelli (who won Best Director in 1959 for Gigi) and Judy Garland (who received a miniature Juvenile Award in 1940), Liza Minnelli won Best Actress in 1973 for Cabaret.
• Four directors share the dubious honour of having been nominated for five Oscars without taking home a single trophy. They are Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, Robert Altman and Clarence Brown.
• Nominated but overlooked as Best Supporting Actor for Anatomy Of A Murder in 1960, George C Scott asked the Academy to take his name off the ballot in 1962 when nominated again for The Hustler. The Academy refused then, and again in 1970 when Scott won Best Actor for Patton. Scott didn't turn up and returned the award to the Academy.
• Despite winning an unsurpassed four acting statuettes, Katharine Hepburn only attended the ceremony once, to present the honorary Irving J Thalberg award to producer Lawrence Weingarten in 1974. Dressed in her gardening clothes, Hepburn responded to the standing ovation with, "I'm very happy I didn't hear anyone call out ‘It's about time!'... I'm living proof that someone can wait 41 years to be unselfish."
• The Oscars are so nicknamed thanks to Margaret Herrick, former librarian for the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences, who commented that the statues looked like her Uncle Oscar (Pierce). The name stuck. The statues themselves (weighing 6 and three-quarter pounds and standing 13 and a half inches tall) were designed in 1928 by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, who doodled the design during an early meeting of the Academy. Unemployed sculptor George Stanley was paid $500 to knock up the first batch.
• Linda Hunt remains the only actress to win an Oscar for playing a man. She appeared as a male photographer, alongside Mel Gibson, in 1981's ‘The Year Of Living Dangerously.'
• Sylvia Miles did the least work ever for an Oscar nomination, appearing onscreen for only six minutes during 1969's Midnight Cowboy. With another two minutes' effort she might have won, as Judi Dench did with her eight-minute performance in 1998's Shakespeare In Love, and Anthony Quinn did with eight minutes' worth of Paul Gauguin in 1956's Lust For Life.
• Screen heart-throb George Clooney this year became the first person in Oscars history to be nominated as best director and in an acting category for different films in the same year. Clooney, 44, won his directing nod for Good Night, And Good Luck and his best supporting actor nod for Syriana.
• The ceremony was postponed three times: in 1938, because of flooding in Los Angeles; in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; and in 1981, after an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan.
• The only brother and sister to win Oscars were Lionel Barrymore for 1931's "A Free Soul" and Ethel Barrymore for 1944's "None But the Lonely Heart."
• The only sisters to win an Oscar each was Olivia de Havilland for ‘To Each His Own,' ‘The Heiress' and Joan Fontaine for ‘Suspicion'
• Bob Hope hosted the Oscar telecast 19 times, more than any other host.