New Facts & Trivia from the 89th Oscars
Tuesday, February 28, 2017 at 2:38PM
NATHANIEL R in Asghar Farhadi, Damien Chazelle, Mel Gibson, Oscar Ceremonies, Oscar Trivia, Screenplays, Viola Davis, foreign films, musicals, releae dates

Before we begin, a quick note that we shouldn't have to share but we do because the rest of the universe has conspired against the proper way of doing things. When we refer to an Oscar ceremony year we are talking about the year of the films honored, not the random month of the following year in which the ceremony is held. What we just witnessed was the 2016 Oscars. We don't know who will even be nominated for the 2017 Oscars yet though we'll make some early bird predictions on April 1st as we do.

Anyway... FACTS. TRIVIA. FUN.

• La La Land's loss was shocking but its performance at the Oscars was not completely without precedent. Two other films in Oscar's 89 years have won the rare combo of Best Actress and Best Director without winning Best Picture. That would be Cabaret (1972, also the single film to win the most Oscars without winning Best Picture) and 7th Heaven (1927) in the very first year of the Oscars. That silent film is an unusual case though as Janet Gaynor won Best Actress for three roles including Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Street Angel (Oscar quickly changed the rules so nominations could only be for one picture.) 

• Arrival (8 nominations) is the first non-war film Best Picture nominee to win Sound Editing only...

...Sound Editing has only been a regular competitive category since 1982 but every other time its been a Best Picture contender's sole win, that contender was a war film:  American Sniper (6 nominations), Zero Dark Thirty (5 nominations) and Letters from Iwo Jima (4 nominations)

• Colleen Atwood's win in costume breaks one of TFE's favorite bits of trivia. It's no longer true that Colleen Atwood (4 wins now) and Sandy Powell (3 wins) only win if they're competing with each other as Powell was not nominated this year. Atwood is now in the top 3 of all time in the category. Which are... 

  1. Edith Head (1897-1981) 8 wins from 35 nominations
  2. Irene Sharaff (1910-1993) 5 wins from 15 nominations
  3. Colleen Atwood -4 wins from 12 nominations
  4. Milena Canonero -4 wins from 9 nominations

Canonero, who is 71, is still working and most recently took the Oscar for Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Colleen Atwood is 68 years old. Though Sandy Powell is in a multi-person tie for 5th place with 3 wins (from 12 nominations), she's the most likely to upset this list in the future as she is only 56 years old and still the favorite designer of many auteurs including Todd Haynes and Martin Scorsese.

• Warren Beatty has now presented the Best Picture Oscar 3 times joining the very rarified company of Steven Spielberg and Elizabeth Taylor. The only people who've done it more than those three giants are Audrey Hepburn (4 times) and Jack Nicholson (8 times)

• Moonlight is the 9th Best Picture winner to have Supporting Actor as its only acting prize. It happens roughly once a decade, the last time being No Country For Old Men (2007). The most common acting prize to go with Best Picture is of course Best Actor, given the Academy's preference for male-driven films. (The sole acting prize for Best Picture being supporting actress has only happened five times and the sole acting prize being best actress only thrice in 89 years!) 

• Kevin O'Connell finally won on his 21st nomination for Sound Mixing of Hacksaw Ridge. So he's no longer the most nominated living person without a win. Now that honor falls to his former business partner Greg P Russell who has 16 nominations (and whose 17th nomination was rescinded right before this ceremony adding extra drama)

Barry Jenkins & Tarell Alvin McCraney winning for Moonlight

• Black men winning Adapted Screenplay is suddenly common. In the past eight years it's happened three times: Precious (2009), Twelve Years a Slave (2013) and Moonlight (2016). Curiously, though, no African-American has won Original Screenplay. The closest anyone came was surely Spike Lee for Do The Right Thing (1989)

• October / November continue to be the best times to release a prospective Best Picture winner, not December contrary to the belief of many distributors and media journalists (the latter group regularly describe release schedule shifts to December in glowingly positive terms as being strategic). After four consecutive years of Best Picture winners in the early Aughts (A Beautiful Mind, 2001 through Million Dollar Baby, 2004), NO Best Picture has been released later than Thanksgiving weekend.

In recent years:

 

• Mel Gibson's oldest daughter (of nine children, only two of them girls) is 36 years old. This is not his daughter. (He does have three grandchildren, though.)

• Moonlight is only the second film in the post SAG era (1994 onward) to have won Best Picture without winning the top prize at any of the three key guild precursors: PGA, DGA, or SAG. The other one is Braveheart (1995) - trivia via Scott Feinberg

• Moonlight is both the first film with an all black cast and the first LGBT film to win Best Picture. Two historic birds felled with one stone!

• Best Supporting Actress is the single most common category for black artists to win Oscars. Viola Davis is the 7th in this category. The second most common category for black artists to win is Best Original Song (6 wins) and the third Supporting Actor (5 wins with Mahershala Ali the newest)

• Viola Davis is only the second person in history to win the Tony and the Oscar for the same role but in different categories. She won the Lead Actress Tony as "Rose" in Fences on Broadway and the supporting actress Oscar. Previously only Yul Brynner (The King & I) had done this winning the featured actor Tony on Broadway and then the Lead Actor Oscar on film.

• This is the first year since 1997 (nearly 20 years ago) in which all of the winners for acting were playing fictional characters. It's been a long looooong stretch until now of Oscar voters preferring biographical portrayals. This is also the first year since 1997 in which all the acting winners were Americans

• Damien Chazelle is now the youngest Best Director winner of all time. He turned 32 just last month. He's also the first American winner of Best Director this decade.

• Chazelle is also the first American Best Director winner this decade thus far. American directors haven't been winning the Oscar as much as they used to. In the 21st century to date there have only been 7 American winners, so less than 50% of the Oscar years: Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind), Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (No Country For Old Men), Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker), and Damien Chazelle (La La Land)

• Asghar Farhadi just won Iran their 2nd Oscar in Foreign Film. He's not the only two time winner in the category but there aren't many who have accomplished this. Not even Pedro Almodovar has done it (weirdly he's only been nominated in the category twice despite his films showing up in other Oscar categories) The only multiple winners for Foreign Film (though technically speaking its the country that wins)

  1. Federico Fellini (4 wins for Italy + 2 other nominations in the category)
  2. Vittorio de Sica (4 wins for Italy + 1 other nomination in the category)
  3. Ingmar Bergman (3 wins for Sweden)
  4. Akira Kurosawa (2 wins, 1 for Japan / 1 for Russia +  2 other nominations in the category)
  5. [TIE] René Clément (2 wins for France) and Asghar Farhadi (2 wins for Iran)

• Oh, one more Viola Davis note. She is not only the most Oscar nominated black woman of all time (with 3 nominations and a win) but she's the only black woman to have ever "Triple-Crowned" (which is the acting win combo of the Tony, Emmy, and Oscar). The only other woman of color to triple crown is Rita Moreno (who is also an EGOT winner). Some people count Whoopi Goldberg but her prizes were not always for acting so while she has those three prizes, it's not the Triple Crown of acting.

• Mahershala Ali is the first Muslim acting winner

• The Costume Design win for Fantastic Beasts marks the very first Oscar win for the Harry Potter franchise (and the first Costume nomination since the original film) which has received 14 Oscar nominations over the course of 9 films and 16 years. In fact, only two of the Potterverse movies have not received any nominations. That would be the second film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and the fifth film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) which is curiously the only one of the films that ever deserved an acting nomination (for Imelda Staunton's Dolores Umbridge). The most common nomination is for Art Direction -- Stuart Craig has 5 nominations for his Production Design on this franchise. The second most common nomination is Visual Effects (3 nods)

• This was the sixth longest Oscar ceremony of all time at 3 hours and 49 minutes. The top 5 are as follows 

  1. 2001 A Beautiful Mind 4 hours and 23 minutes... (Halle Berry's historic win wasn't the only thing that took up an unusual amount of time!)
  2. 1998 American Beauty 4 hours and 9 minutes
  3. 1998 Shakespeare in Love 4 hours and 2 minutes
  4. 1939 Gone With the Wind 3 hours and 52 minutes (non-televised obviously)
  5. 2006 The Departed 3 hours and 51 minutes

P.S. If you can think of an additional piece of trivia that's new via Oscar night, let us know in the comments.

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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