22 days til Oscar - Walt Disney and his nearest rivals (?)

by Nathaniel R

Everyone presumably knows that Walt Disney (1901-1966), one of the 20th century's most influential titans, holds the records of most competitive Oscar wins. He amassed a total of 22 Oscars in his career which broke down like so:

• 12 animated shorts
• 6 live action shorts *
• 2 documentary shorts
• 2 documentary features

A few notes on these achievements and Disney's nearest rivals in these categories (and whether or not the ranks might change) after the jump...

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Best Actor & Best Actress. Vote on the Trivia-Filled Charts

by Nathaniel R

Lead acting nominees ranked by how many Best Picture nominees they've starred in.

We continue to expand the Oscar charts so we're hope you're enjoying them. All four acting charts are now complete, with Best Actress and Best Actor both newly updated with lots of trivia, theories on how the actors were nominated and more. Just like how we did with Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor. Don't forget you can vote each day on who should win. But for the here and now, here's some trivia in relation to all four acting categories combined:

BY THE NUMBERS
64 = average gross (in millions) of their nominated movies (box office numbers via a couple of days ago)
52 = number of Oscar nominations between them
47 = the average age of this year's nominees 
33 = average number of films they've appeared in
18 = number of children they have among them
9 = number of Emmys won by this group (Close x 3, King x 3, McCarthy x 2, and Malek)
5 = number of Oscars won by this group (Ali, Bale, Rockwell, Stone, and Weisz)
3 = number of Tonys won by this group (Glenn Close only)
2.6 = average number of Best Picture nominees that they've each starred in*
2.4 = the average number of Oscar nominations (in acting) for this year's nominees
2 = number of the nominees married to other famous actors (Elliott & Weisz)
2 = number of nominees who have played Meryl Streep's immediate family on film (Olivia Colman was her daughter in Iron Lady, and Glenn Close her mother in Evening... albeit in flashbacks with Mamie Gummer as the young Meryl)

PERCENTAGES
35% of the nominated characters are LGBTQ people
35% of the nominees were born outside the US (Adams, Aparicio, Bale, Colman, de Tavira, Grant, Weisz)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
30% of the nominees are Water signs (3 Scorpios, 2 Pisces, and 1 Cancer) 
25% are former Oscar winners
25% of the characters nominated are politicians of some sort, professionally or in practice
25% of the characters nominated are musicians or employed in the music industry
20% of the nominated actors have performed on Broadway (Close, Cooper, Stone, Weisz)
20% of the nominated characters are dying or dead by the credit scrawl of these pictures.
20% are former Emmy winners
10% are former Tony nominees (Close & Cooper)
0% of the actors nominated are LGBTQ ...
(but Lady Gaga is mother monster so maybe she counts a little?)

RANDOMNESS
There are no Geminis nominated! It's the only sign not nominated and as a Gemini, we object!

* Those figures are much higher than they used to be pre 2009 when the Best Picture field expanded. It used to be uncommon to have lots of Best Picture nominees on your resume which makes Willem Dafoe's record particularly impressive. He's appeared in the most Best Picture nominees of this group of 20 actors, SIX in total, and yet only one of them (The Grand Budapest Hotel) happened in the current expanded Best Picture era. 

All 95 Foreign Film Nominees This Century. Oscar & Box Office Trivia!

by Nathaniel R

Roma's great competition: Shoplifters, Never Look Away, Cold War, and Capernaum

Dear readers, I've been filled with existential despair this week. I'm not sure how to continue covering the Oscars next year if the Oscars are going to drain all the art out of it by denying all the categories that make cinema, cinema, and announcing them off air. I haven't quite formed my thoughts on this (I expect this upcoming Oscar night to be disastrous) for a complete post but while we still have the more movie-fan friendly categories to look forward to let's continue to talk about them!  We've done some research on how the foreign film category tends to fare in the US marketplace that we wanted to share. In addition to being a super high quality roster, this year's Foreign Film list has done well with audiences, too. 

Both Poland's Cold War  and Japan's Shoplifters have become genuine hits and will certainly outgross the long runs of the last few years worth of most talked about foreign flicks whether or not they were Oscar nominated like The Square, A Fantastic Woman , Elle, The Salesman, and The Handmaiden. In fact, in any year without Roma or each other in it, wouldn't Cold War or Shoplifters be winning this category with ease ?!? 

After the jump, let's take a look back at all 95 nominees this century and how well they fared at the box office. Plus lots of trivia just because trivia is fun and will ward off the despair...

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Oscar Trivia: How often do three films dominate the acting categories?

Bradley & Gaga at the beginning of their run for "A Star is Born"by Nathaniel R

With the 20 acting nominations this year coming from only 11 films this year we got to wondering how frequently that happens. The Favourite, Vice, and A Star is Born all received 3 acting nods each. Green Book and Roma received doubles, though of course doubles happen frequently. But how often do three acting noms from three separate films happen in a single year? And is this anything like a record? This was somewhat tough to investigate but investigate we did.

MOST NOMINATIONS EVER FOR ACTING FROM A SINGLE FILM

Before we get to individual years which had a small pool of films dominating the acting prizes, let's look at the films that hold the record for nominations:  It's an nine-way tie for the record with the following films receiving 5 acting nominations each...

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Michel Legrand (1932-2019)

by Eric Blume

Michel Legrand in 1981French film composer Michel Legrand passed away this past weekend after six decades of work in the industry. He was truly one of the greats. Chief among his accomplishments was the sung-through score for the masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), delivering music that soared and perfectly caught the melancholy tone of director Jacques Demy’s pastel/sad view of the world.  The Legrand-Demy collaboration was deliriously French and remains a pristine achievement over a half century later...

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