The first sound film to win the Oscar for Best Picture was The Broadway Melody (1928-29).

 

The first movie in color to win the Oscar for Best Picture was Gone With the Wind (1939).

The only sequel to date to win the Oscar for Best Picture is 1974’s The Godfather Part II.

 

The first non-Hollywood film to win the Oscar for Best Picture was Hamlet (1948), which was financed and filmed in England.

The first foreign-language performance to win an Oscar was Sophia Loren’s work in Two Women. Ms Loren won the 1961 Best Actress Award for that role.

Cimarron (1931), Dances With Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992) are the only westerns to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Justin Henry, then 8 and the actor who played the young boy in 1979’s Kramer vs Kramer, was the youngest Oscar nominee in history.

The youngest winner for the Best Actor Oscar was Richard Dreyfuss, at 29, for 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. Marlee Matlin, at age 21, was the youngest female to win an Oscar for Best Actress, for the film Children of a Lesser God.

The youngest winner for the Best Actor Oscar was Richard Dreyfuss, at 29, for 1977’s The Goodbye Girl.

The only married couples who have each won Oscars are Laurence Olivier (Hamlet, 1948) and Vivien Leigh (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951) and Paul Newman (The Color of Money, 1986) and Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces of Eve, 1957).

The only actors who have directed themselves to Best Actor Oscars are Laurence Olivier for 1948’s Hamlet and Roberto Benigni for 1998’s Life Is Beautiful.

The first Oscar Awards ceremony took place on May 16, 1929, during a banquet in The Blossom Room of The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Between 250 and 270 people attended (accounts vary).

Dinner for the first Academy Awards ceremony, which took place in May 1929, included consommé, filet of sole, broiled chicken, string beans, and potatoes.

When Jack Palance won a Supporting Actor Oscar for City Slickers in 1992, he set a record for the longest gap between initial nomination and victory. He had first been nominated forty years earlier, for Sudden Fear.

To conserve on materials during World War II, Oscar statuettes were made of plaster rather than tin, copper and gold plate. When the war was over, recipients of the plaster Oscars were belatedly given the real thing.

The sealed envelope system for announcing Oscar winners was adopted in 1941. Prior to that the winners were known in advance because the names were given to newspapers before to the ceremony.