25 Days Until Oscar...

Twenty-five days is not much. Are you ready? For today's special number, I thought we'd look back at the 25th annual Oscars, the first televised Academy Awards ever, but then I realized we'd already written a huge post about it with actresses falling on stairs and everything! So let's keep this simple. What's your choice for BEST of 1952 (beyond Singin' in the Rain)?

The nominees were:

• The Greatest Show on Earth
• High Noon
• Ivanhoe
• Moulin Rouge
• The Quiet Man

...and if there'd been three to five more nominees they would surely have included The Bad and the Beautiful which won 5 Oscars, the most ever won by a non Best Picture nominee), and Viva Zapata! which had 5 nominations, 3 of them major categories. If it had extended beyond 7 perhaps a combo of less loved or more divisive pictures like My Cousin Rachel (the remake is coming out this very year starring Rachel Weisz), Sudden Fear (4 noms and it's awesome), 5 Fingers (2 major nominations and British so prestige), or either of the traditional biopics like Hans Christian Anderson (6 nominations) or With a Song in My Heart (5 nominations). Famously they weren't into Singin' in the Rain at the time (2 nominations) which will always be a bonkers fact. 

Toni Erdmann and The Longest Foreign Nominees

By Dancin Dan

If you've heard one thing about Germany's Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Toni Erdmann, other than how great it is (and you can add me to the chorus of voices showering it with praise), it's probably been that Maren Ade's shaggy-dog comedy is LONG. So, trivia hound that I am, I was naturally curious to see just how long it was in the grand scheme of Oscar.

Toni Erdmann has either the 16th or 17th longest running time of all the films nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. That confusion comes from the weirdness of different versions of films and which ones the Academy actually saw when voting...

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26 Days Until Oscar. Sing-along with Sammy Cahn

On this 26th day before Oscar, why not sing along to classic tunes co-written by Sam Cahn who received an incredible 26 Oscar nominations. He was so popular in his time that he even posed for pictures like this! Hee.

Yes, dear reader, there are people with more Oscar nominations than Meryl Streep.  Not many of them, mind you, and the bulk of them seem to be from the sound or music branches...

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29 Days until Oscar

29 is the number of the day. It's also the most common age for Best Actress winners. That's quite something if you consider that the youngest best actor winner of all time was 29 and just a month shy of his 30th (Adrien Brody, The Pianist). The gender bias that preferences young actresses and older men gets even worse when you realize that HALF of all Best Actress winners won by the age of 33. Less than 10% of Best Actor winners were 33 and under. The eight women who won at 29 are...

Emma Stone is the youngest Best Actress nominee this year at 28 and expected to win by most pundits. Stone is the same age now as the following winners were: Norma Shearer in The Divorcee, Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, Luise Rainer in The Good Earth and Charlize Theron in Monster.

Curiously there is no "most common age" for Best Actors (spread out fairly evenly from mid 30s to mid 40s) or Best Supporting Actress (all over the place). The most common age for Supporting Actor winners is 46 (seven winners).

30 Days Until Oscar

30 is...

...the running time of Wallace & Gromit's Oscar winning shorts A Close Shave (1995) and The Wrong Trousers (1993)

...the number of features directed by Steven Spielberg from Sugarland Express (1974) to The BFG (2016)

...the age of Bette Davis and Hilary Swank when they won their second Best Actress Oscars for Jezebel (1938) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) respectively

...the year of Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front

... and the age at which you get all dressed up to be "terminated" in Logan's Run (1976). For the good of society!