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The Oscars are finally screening this Sunday in the US, or early Monday morning for us.
After a delay of two months, due to obvious reasons, the Oscars are finally about to kick off.
Let’s have some fun, with help from the BBC, which came up with 19 “geeky” facts about the award ceremony and nominees present and past.
We’ve selected five of those, starting with…
1. First off, an Oscar record goes to…Borat, for the longest movie title ever!
It’s easier just to say ‘Borat 2’, but it turns out that there’s a lot more to it.
The full title of Sacha Baron Cohen’s double-nominated film is Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Guess how many characters make up that title?
A total of 110, which is more than the previous record-holder, a film from 1964 that only had a measly 85 characters: Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes.
2. The best picture category won’t accept Soul.
The very popular Pixar film, Soul, with characters voiced by Tina Fey, Jamie Foxx, and Graham Norton, isn’t in the running for best picture.
That seems soulless because it is damn good, but that’s just how it is at the Academy Awards.
They hardly ever nominate animation films;
In fact, only three animated films have ever been nominated for best picture – Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010), none of which actually won.
It does have a good chance of winning in the best animation feature category, though.
3. Hillbilly Elegy‘s Glenn Close is nominated for best supporting actress… and worst supporting actress.
Have you seen this movie on Netflix? It was hugely divisive, with Rotten Tomatoes recording a large gap between the viewers’ score (84%) and the critics’ score (26%).
Following on from that, Close has been nominated for best supporting actress at the Oscars, but also worst supporting actress at the alternative ceremony, the Razzies.
She is only the third actor ever to score the dual Oscar-Razzie nomination for the same performance. The others were Amy Irving (for Yentl) and James Coco (Only When I Laugh).
4. All the acting winners could be people of colour.
Just like the Screen Actors Guild ceremony, with all four winners from ethnic minority groups, this year’s Oscars could end up looking the same.
The winning SAG squad was Yuh-Jung Youn, Daniel Kaluuya, Viola Davis, and Chadwick Boseman.
This is a record-breaking year for racial diversity in general at the Oscars, with nine ethnic minority actors nominated out of 20 available slots.
And for the first time ever, the majority of nominees for best leading actor are not white. Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman are nominated alongside Boseman, Riz Ahmed and Steven Yeun.
5. The last time the winners of best actress and best actor were from the same film was 1998.
It could happen this year, as Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman could both win for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The last time this double occurred was in 1998, when Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson cleaned up in As Good As It Gets.
We have to add something about the proudly South African documentary, My Octopus Teacher, being nominated.
We are holding all of our thumbs!
[source:bbc]
