• Jane Campion is the only female director to have been nominated for Best Picture and Best Director (The Piano, 1993).
• The Color Purple holds the joint record (with The Turning Point) for most nominations (11), but no wins.
• Warren Beatty is the second person in Academy history to be nominated simultaneously in four categories (producer, actor, director and writer). He's been nominated for all four twice (Heaven Can Wait, 1978, and Reds, 1981).
• Hilary Swank's Oscar makes her the second actress to win for playing a member of the opposite sex. The previous winner was Linda Hunt (Year of Living Dangerously, 1983).
• The first 1,000 guests at Elton John's after-show party will get gift bags valued at $650 each. That's nothing however compared with the gift baskets the Oscar presenters are to receive. Those are worth up to $15,000 and include a baseball autographed by Joe DiMaggio and a Montblanc pen.
• Hedd Wyn is the first and only Welsh-language film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language film, in 1993.
• The only sequel to win Best Picture is Godfather II.
• Guests arriving for the Oscar ceremony in 1940 could buy the 8.45pm edition of the Los Angeles Times in which the winners were announced. The following year, the sealed-envelope system was adopted.
• Last year, all the Best Picture nominees were for period films set at least 50 years earlier.
• It isn't entirely clear why the Awards are known as the Oscars. The most popular story has it that an Academy librarian and eventual executive director, Margaret Herrick, thought the statue resembled her uncle Oscar and said so. A reporter standing conveniently nearby is alleged to have overheard her and helped brand the golden guy. The Academy itself didn't use the nickname officially until 1939.
• Walt Disney received an Oscar and seven miniature statuettes when he was honoured for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938.
• In support of the war effort, the Academy handed out plaster Oscar statuettes during world war two. After the war, winners were able to exchange their plaster awards for golden statuettes.
• This year, there are 5,607 voting members of the Academy. Members represent 13 branches of arts and sciences of motion pictures - Actors, Art Directors, Cinematographers, Directors, Executives, Film Editors, Music, Producers, Public Relations, Short Films and Feature Animation, Sound, Visual Effects and Writers.
• The Silence of the Lambs is the only horror film to have won Best Picture.
• Shirley Temple was the youngest winner when she won a juvenile Academy Award, aged six. The youngest winner of a "regular" Academy Award was Tatum O'Neal, who, at age 10, won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Paper Moon. The oldest winner was George Burns (Best Actor, aged 80).
• Instead of collecting his Best Director award for Annie Hall in 1977, Woody Allen was playing the clarinet in Michael's, a New York jazz bar.
• Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director five times, but never won.
• Steven Spielberg bought at auction Clark Gable's Best Actor Oscar (for It Happened one Night) for $550,000.
• Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep hold the joint record for most nominations (12 each). Jack Nicholson takes second place, with 11 nominations.
• The only blind Oscar winner is Stevie Wonder (in 1984, for I Just Called To Say I Love You).
• 1987 is the only year when none of the nominees for Best Director were born in the US.
• The Awards have only been rescheduled three times in their 73-year history. The first occasion was in 1938 when floods all but washed out Los Angeles and delayed the ceremony by a week. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the ceremony was postponed by two days out of respect for the murdered civil rights leader. In 1981, the Awards were postponed for 24 hours due to the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
• In 1974, the ceremony was interrupted by a streaker (prompting presenter David Niven to quip: "Just think, the only laugh that man will probably ever get is for stripping off and showing his shortcomings.")
• More people have been nominated for playing Henry VIII than for any other character, historic or fictional.
• The first black actor to win Best Actor was Sidney Poitier, in 1963 for Lilies of the Field.
• The only person to receive an award posthumously was actor Peter Finch (for Network, 1976).
