Random Oscar Trivia

God I love this and I remember fondly the time when I used to be paid to find this kind of shit out.

(Cary, remember how much articles like this helped us and led to fun office quizzes?)


By Dave Karger @ EW

Here are a handful of interesting (well, to me, at least) tidbits from yesterday’s announcement of the 82nd Annual Academy Award nominations.

1. Avatar received nine nominations but was left out of Best Screenplay. The last film to win Best Picture with out a screenplay nomination? James Cameron’s last nominee, Titanic.

2. Avatar wasn’t nominated for SAG Best Cast, lost the PGA and DGA awards, and is likely to lose the WGA prize later this month. Since the SAG Best Cast prize was introduced in 1996, no film has ever won Best Picture without winning at least one of the four major guild awards.

3. With four nominations, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot tied with Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the most nods for a Trek film.

4. Up in the Air scored six nominations (including three for acting, more than any other movie) but was left out of Best Editing. No film has won Best Picture without an editing nomination since Ordinary People in 1981.

5. Up in the Air producers Jason and Ivan Reitman are the first father/son producing team to be nominated for Best Picture since Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori for Il Postino in 1995.

6. Precious is the first-ever Best Picture nominee to be directed by an African-American filmmaker.

7. Earning her 16th career acting nomination for Julie & Julia, Meryl Streep broke her own record—again—for the most nominated actor in Oscar history.

8. This year’s SAG nominees in the individual acting races lined up with the eventual acting nominees 19 for 20, the most ever. The only Oscar nominee not to earn a SAG nod first: Crazy Heart’s Maggie Gyllenhaal.

9. If Avatar wins Best Picture, it’ll be the highest-grossing winner ever (obviously).

10. If The Hurt Locker wins Best Picture, it’ll be the lowest-grossing winner ever.

11. The last time Meryl Streep won an Oscar, in 1983, was before her competitors Carey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe were even born.