🎬 Five Things You Didn't Know About the Oscars (But Should)
“5 Oscar secrets Hollywood doesn’t advertise”
Tonight is the 98th Academy Awards, and Hollywood does what it does best: roll out the gold, the gowns, and the speeches. But behind all that glamour sits nearly a century of genuinely strange history. Here are five Oscar facts that most people have never heard.
The very first Academy Awards ceremony lasted exactly 15 minutes. The 1929 banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was a private dinner for about 270 guests, and the winners had already been announced publicly three months before the event even took place. No suspense. No sealed envelopes. Just dinner, a quick handoff of some statues, and everyone went home before their dessert got cold.
Barry Fitzgerald was nominated twice for the exact same performance in the same year. At the 1944 Oscars, Fitzgerald was on the ballot for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for his role in Going My Way. He lost Best Actor to Bing Crosby, who was also in Going My Way, but won Best Supporting Actor that same night. The Academy quietly closed that loophole afterward, and it has never happened since.
The sealed envelope tradition exists because a newspaper ruined everything. Before the 1940 ceremony honoring Gone with the Wind, the Los Angeles Times published all the winners in an evening edition before the show even started. Stars like Clark Gable were finding out they lost while still on their way to the event. The Academy responded by switching to sealed envelopes delivered only at the moment of announcement, a practice that has been in place ever since.
Only one person has ever legally sold their Oscar statuette at auction. Since 1950, winners must sign an agreement offering their statue back to the Academy for $1 before selling it to anyone else. But Harold Russell, who won Best Supporting Actor in 1947 for The Best Years of Our Lives, won his award three years before that rule existed. In 1993, he sold his statuette at auction for $60,500 to help pay for his wife’s medical expenses. The Academy, to its credit, did not try to stop him.
Katharine Hepburn won four Oscars and attended the ceremony exactly once. She holds the all-time record for Best Actress wins, but she skipped almost every ceremony entirely, believing the competitive nature of the awards ran counter to the spirit of filmmaking. Her single appearance came in 1974, not to collect an award, but to present one. She walked onstage and immediately joked that she was surprised no one had shouted “it’s about time.”
The 98th Academy Awards are live tonight from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Conan O’Brien hosts for the second year running, and Sinners arrives with a record-breaking 16 nominations. Whatever happens tonight, the history behind this ceremony is always the better story.