81st Annual Academy Awards: Interesting Facts

With the Awards over, here are some statistics about the winners:


• Slumdog Millionaire is the 11th film to win Best Picture without receiving any acting nominations. The other 10 are: Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Hotel, An American in Paris, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Gigi, The Last Emperor, Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

• Sean Penn is the ninth actor to win two Best (Lead) Actor Oscars, following: Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, and last year's Daniel Day-Lewis.

• Heath Ledger is the second posthumous winner in acting following Peter Finch for Network.

• Woody Allen has tied Elia Kazan as the director responsible for the most wins in the Best Supporting Actress category-- with four each [Allen: Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); Kazan: Celeste Holm in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Kim Hunter in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront (1954), and Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden (1955)].

• Japan won three of the eight awards for foreign-language film in the pre-1956 Oscars ceremonies when the award was an honorary award; this year, Departures becomes the first Japanese film to win a competive award for Best Foreign-language film.

• This is the first year since the 2004/05 (Million Dollar Baby) Oscars that Entertainment Weekly correctly predicted 6/6 of the top awards-- the last three years they were off by one (the incorrect predictions were-- 2005: Best Picture, Brokeback Mountain/ 2006: Eddie Murphy, Best Supporting Actor/ 2007: Julie Christie, Best Actress)

• The least amount of feature films (ten) took home Oscars since 2003 (nine).

• This year's Oscars had the ceremonies' third-smallest audience (36.3 million) in forty years, following 2003 (33 million viewers) and 2008 (32 million).