25 Wacky Oscar facts

by Jake Spaulding

Hundreds of millions of people around the world tune in each year to the Academy Awards. As brand awareness goes, Oscar's little golden visage ranks right up there with the arches of Mickey D's and Nike's ubiquitous Swoosh.

But how well do you really know Hollywood's grand prix? We've rounded up some fascinating bits and pieces to enlighten even the most hard-core awards wonks. The nominees are...

1. The Academy Awards statuette was designed in 1928 by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, who doodled it during an early meeting of the fledgling Academy.

An unemployed sculptor named George Stanley was paid $500 to produce the first batch of Oscars. The design has not changed since, except for the number of holes in the film spool upon which the Oscar figure stands. In 1929, the spool had five holes, which represented the five branches of the Academy; now it has 13 holes, for 13 branches.

2. The red carpet that leads into the new Kodak Theater for this year's Oscar show will run through a shopping mall, past more than two dozen stores, including Versace, Ralph Lauren Polo, Luxe Lingerie, Neuhaus Chocolatier, Louis Vuitton, Origins, Planet Funk and the Build-a-Bear Workshop. Stars walking the carpet will not, however, be able to stop and shop: At the insistence of the Academy, the mall architecture includes removable signs and curtain rods that allow the storefronts to be completely hidden.

3. Robert Opal, best known as the streaker who disrupted the 1973 Oscar ceremony, was later hired by flamboyant producer Allan Carr to streak at a party for dancer Rudolph Nureyev. Carr went on to produce 1988's Oscar show, the most widely derided in history; Opal was murdered in his San Francisco sex shop in 1979.

4. During the 1982 Oscar ceremony, Zbigniew Rybczynski, who'd just won for best animated short, stepped outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a cigarette. A by-the-book security guard refused to readmit the Polish filmmaker, who pleaded, "I have Oscar!" to no avail. A frustrated Rybczynski kicked the guard and was subsequently arrested and thrown in jail.

5. Academy Award nominations are tabulated using what is known as the "preferential" or "weighted average" system, an enormously complicated formula whose only other notable adherent is the Australian Parliament. Under the system, nominating votes are weighted differently on virtually every ballot, depending on the votes already counted. The system is so involved that few voters understand it. The final votes to determine Oscar winners are, however, counted in the standard way.

6. The 1960 Oscar campaign mounted on behalf of John Wayne's expensive flop The Alamo is considered the most offensive and overwrought in history. (Yes, that includes recent campaigns by Miramax.) Wayne's assault--which netted seven nominations but only a single win, for sound--included ads calling his flag-waving flick "The George Washington of films, storming the celluloid heights for God and country" and "the most important motion picture ever made." Supporting Actor nominee Chill Wills upped the ante with an ad listing all the Oscar winners he'd ever voted for, and another listing the membership by name and concluding, "Win, lose or draw, you're still my cousins, and I love you all." Groucho Marx took out his own ad in reply: "Dear Mr. Wills," he wrote, "I am delighted to be your cousin, but I'm still voting for Sal Mineo."

7. The first Academy Awards ceremony, which took place in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929, was a dinner for 270 Academy members and guests. The menu included consomme, filet of sole, broiled chicken, string beans and potatoes, Waxed candy replicas of the Oscar statuette graced every table, just as Wolfgang Puck's gold-wrapped chocolate Oscars now adorn each table at the Governor's Ball. Winners were chosen by a panel of five judges, although MGM chief Louis B. Mayer sat in on the deliberations to, he said, "supervise."

8. After receiving a Best Actor nomination for Lawrence of Arabia in 1963, Peter O'Toole announced he was immediately raising his fee to $500,000 per movie--unless he won the Oscar, in which case he would require $1 million. The escalator clause never kicked in, as O'Toole lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, O'Toole would be nominated for Best Actor six more times but would never win.

9. Eight years before appearing as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, a 13-year-old Elijah Wood made his first appearance at the Academy Awards. He was a last-minute replacement for Macaulay Culkin, who had been slated to present the Visual Effects Oscar but was quietly booted off the show when he insisted his lines be rewritten.

10. Studios vying for nominations are permitted to send Academy members videocassettes or DVDs of the films they wish to have considered, but the Academy's rules prohibit them from sending the same tapes or DVDs members could rent at their local video store. That's because the guidelines ban any information about the making of the movie or any packaging that would "extol the merits of a film," mention previous awards received or quote from favorable reviews. Studios are also prohibited from serving refreshments at Academy screenings, sending screening schedules on glossy paper or card stock or calling members on behalf of eligible films.

11. To obtain the broadcast rights to the Academy Awards ceremony, ABC pays the Academy about $20 million per year. This is enough to bankroll virtually the entire annual operating budget of the Academy.

12. Before winning Academy Awards for Schindler's List (in 1994) and Saving Private Ryan (in 199 , Steven Spielberg was routinely overlooked by Academy voters, repeatedly losing (or not even being nominated) despite such films as The Color Purple, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. His first notable snub came in 1975, when he was not nominated for Best Director, despite the Best Picture nomination for his film Jaws. Spielberg had invited a crew to film him as the nominations were announced, thus immortalizing his unfortunate reaction: "I can't believe it. They went for Fellini instead of me."

13. At the 1934 Oscars, emcee Will Rogers opened the Best Picture envelope and said, "Come on up and get it, Frank!" Director Frank Capra, who expected to win for Lady for a Day, jumped out of his seat and made his way to the stage--but before he reached it, he realized Rogers had been speaking to Cavalcade director Frank Lloyd. A humiliated Capra vowed to never again attend the Academy Awards--a vow that evaporated the following year, when he won for It Happened One Night. Shortly thereafter, Capra was elected president of the Academy.

14. Admission to the Academy is by invitation only and usually requires a significant body of work. But in 1968, the normal rules were waived for Barbra Streisand, who was allowed to join before she'd even finished making her first film, Funny Girl. (Academy president Gregory Peck defended the invitation, foreseeing "what will obviously be an important [movie] career" for the singer.) Streisand was nominated for Best Actress for that film; she and Katharine Hepburn both won Oscars, in one of the Academy's rare ties. Assuming Streisand voted for herself (and does anybody honestly think she didn't?), that means her early admission to the Academy won her an Oscar.

15. Henry Fonda's wife Shirlee, who was not an Academy member, once admitted to the late film critic Gene Siskel that she had frequently filled out her husband's Oscar ballot. Other Academy wives, she added, had done the same. "I'm sure this sort of thing happens..." said Academy president Howard Koch after reading Fonda's comments. "Anyone who talks about it, however, is very foolish."

16. After Joan Crawford and Bette Davis starred together in 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (stirring up plenty of rumors that they didn't get along), only Davis was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Crawford was so offended she immediately wrote letters to the other four nominees, congratulating them and offering to accept their awards if they couldn't make it to the show. Anne Bancroft won and Crawford accepted, while a furious Davis stood by and fumed.

17. Originally, the Academy permitted write-in votes. Although Bette Davis received a massive write-in campaign on behalf of her performance in 1934's Of Human Bondage, she did not win. Only one write-in candidate ever claimed victory: cinematographer Hal Mohr, for A Midsummer Night's Dream, in 1935.

18. In 1958, show producer Jerry Wald sent a memo to all participants banning cleavage at the Oscars. The previous year, Wald explained, the network had been deluged with complaints about excessively low necklines. Most of the offended, he added, were from the Midwest.

19. In 1995, Oscar host David Letterman originally planned to raffle off a car onstage in the middle of the show. When the giveaway didn't play well during rehearsal, it was scrapped, thereby denying a new set of wheels to Sally "You really like me" Field, whom Letterman had decided would win the rigged drawing.

20. The Academy controls which advertisements can be shown during the Oscar telecast. The organization does not permit any film ads to be shown, and it also bans commercials from amusement parks whose titles include the name of a movie studio. For example, Six Flags could advertise during the Oscars, but Disneyland and Universal Studios Florida could not. This year, because of decreased ad spending in the troubled economy, ABC lowered the price of an ad on the Oscar show to about $1 million per 30 seconds, down from last year's $1.3 million.

21. 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.

22. During WWII, to conserve on materials, Oscar statuettes were made of plaster rather than tin, copper and gold plate. When the war was over, recipients of the plaster Oscars, including Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman, were belatedly given the real thing.

23. After receiving a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Anatomy of a Murder but losing to Ben-Hur's clearly less deserving Hugh Griffith in 1959, actor George C. Scott tried to decline his nomination (for The Hustler) in the same category two years later. The Academy refused to take him off the ballot--a move the organization repeated in 1970 when Scott again tried to decline a nomination, this time his Best Actor nod for Patton. "Frankly," Scott said, "I resent being put on show like a buffoon." Scott won for Patton but refused to accept the award; the following year, he tried to turn down his nomination for The Hospital. Strangely enough, in 1983, Scott called the Academy at the last minute and asked if it might possibly find him and his wife a pair of seats for the Oscar ceremony. It did.

24. Jessica Tandy is the oldest person ever to win an Academy Award for acting. She won the Best Actress award in 1989 for Driving Miss Daisy, at the age of 80 years, 293 days. The Supporting Actress category boasts the youngest acting winner, Tatum O'Neal, who was 10 years and 148 days old when she won for Paper Moon in 1973. (Shirley Temple received an honorary Oscar in 1934, when she was five.)

25. Throughout the 1930s, newspapers were given advance notice of Oscar winners so they could publish the results the night of the ceremony. In 1937, Best Actress nominee Gladys George took advantage of this by leaving her seat and strolling through the press room, where she learned she'd lost to Luise Rainer. In the women's room, George broke the news to odds-on favorite Carole Lombard that she, too, was a loser. Three years later, after some guests bought the late edition of the Los Angeles Times and read the results on their way to the Oscar ceremony, the Academy opted for sealed envelopes and extreme secrecy.