Meet Lil' Oscar.^note The statuette is officially known as the Academy Award of Merit. Just how it came to be nicknamed "Oscar" is a matter of some dispute; see the relevant article on Wikipedia for more details.

As the most prominent and famous Award Show for film (especially in the United States), there are a lot of varied views on the Academy Awards. Some passionately follow the awards races every season like a sport, trying to predict winners; others tune in to see the collection of celebrities, while others still watch just to complain that their favorite film was snubbed. No matter where you stand on the ceremony, the Awards have a rich and complicated history worth exploring.

Introduced in 1929, the Academy Awards — more familiarly known as the "Oscars" — are given out annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to honor the best films and filmmakers of each given year, with a predominant focus on Hollywood and other facets of the American film industry (although a prestigious "Best International Feature Film" award exists, and occasionally a foreign film will sneak its way into a Best Picture nomination or even a win). The award's purpose was originally to encourage better filmmaking and promote the industry, so it makes sense that it is presented in a star-studded, multi-hour televised ceremony that is often among the highest rated non-sports programs of the year. Though there are several other Award Shows of its type, most famously the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, the Oscars are by far the most popular and well-known and are the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier for most things associated with awards ceremonies. Due to their popularity and nearly century-long history, receiving an Oscar is incredibly prestigious; it's generally considered the highest honor one can receive for filmmaking.

The Academy that votes on who wins the awards is not a school, but a group of people in the film industry dedicated to advancing films. Apart from the Oscars, the Academy runs several charity events and scholarships, operates libraries and archives in Los Angeles, and has a museum dedicated to motion picture history. The Academy has about 10,000 members; the exact number is unknown and is by invitation only. The only way to become a member is either to be nominated for an Oscar or be sponsored by other Academy members and pass a review process. It's all very shadowy and political and insider-y, and a bit like trying to get into a yacht club, though in recent years, the Academy has begun releasing annual lists of new members to try to shake off that image. The Academy is organized into several branches based on different disciplines (actors, musicians, cinematographers, etc.). The branches select the nominees by themselves—each branch's balloting and qualification process can be quite different (see the example of the documentary branch). The Academy as a whole nominates 10 films for Best Picture and votes from each category's final nominees to determine who wins each category's Oscar.

What films become eligible can depend on various criteria; aside from the individual categories' requirements, the primary rule is that they must be exhibited in a movie theater in Los Angeles County for at least one week. (The 2021 Oscars waived that rule due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.) The awards often receive criticism from more mainstream audiences for focusing essentially on smaller, artsy films over blockbusters. This essentially began in 1977, when Star Wars lost Best Picture to Annie Hall. Since then, it's been rare for many of the top-grossing films of a given year to also get nominated for (let alone win) the top honor.^note Some of the most notable examples when the highest-grossing films of the year did win are films like Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Many see little to no problem with this inclination (box office success being its own reward), while others fervently believe the Sci-Fi Ghetto is at fault and that the Oscars are dominated by snobby films designed solely to win awards, a phenomenon dubbed "Oscar Bait".

Any time the awards are mentioned, expect someone to mention an Award Snub. That a film someone likes didn't win is one of the most-discussed aspects of the Awards; even years later, many are still sore over their favourites losing out to what they see as an inferior film.

For tropes about the award presentation show itself, see Academy Awards Ceremonies. For a list of winners in the Best Picture, Best Director, and acting categories, see Academy Award Winners.

NOTE: For consistency's sake, all the year references are for the awarded year, rather than the year the ceremony was broadcast.

• Best Picture
• Best Directing
• Best Actor in a Leading Role
• Best Actor in a Supporting Role
• Best Actress in a Leading Role
• Best Actress in a Supporting Role
• Best Animated Feature
• Best Animated Short Film
• Best Cinematography
• Best Costume Design
• Best Documentary Feature
• Best Documentary (Short Subject)
• Best Film Editing
• Best International Feature Film
• Best Live-Action Short Film
• Best Makeup and Hairstyling
• Best Original Score
• Best Original Song
• Best Production Design
• Best Sound
• Best Visual Effects
• Best Adapted Screenplay
• Best Original Screenplay
• Best Casting

Oscar Trivia

General

• The Oscar statuette was designed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer art director Cedric Gibbons (who later won the award more than anyone save for Walt Disney, 11 total times) and sculpted by George Stanley in Los Angeles for the first ceremony. While the Academy officially describes it as "a knight standing on a reel of film gripping a crusader's sword", many people have noted the similarity to ancient statues of the Egyptian god Ptah, usually depicted standing and holding a staff the same way the Oscar holds its sword. There was a vogue for neo-Egyptian design in the wake of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, which heavily influenced the Art Deco movement that Hollywood was embracing at the time. Add to that the fact that Ptah was "a maker of things and patron of craftspeople", and it seems more likely that he was the intended reference point.
• The first Oscar ceremony involved quite a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness.
  • There was no "Best Picture Award" given, but instead, two different (and oddly redundant) awards—Most Outstanding Production (which went to Wings) and Most Unique and Artistic Quality of Production (which went to Sunrise). After that first ceremony, the awards were combined into a single Best Production Award, which was later renamed Best Picture. Due to this, many sources list Wings as the sole "Best Picture" winner for the first ceremony (both categories are listed below). Wings is also the only true silent film to win Best Picture; over 80 years later, The Artist would win for being an homage to silent films but had a traditional score and some sound effects.
  • Winners were announced in advance, and Runner-Up awards were given.
  • An award for Best Title Writing was given out. With the silent film era rapidly drawing to a close, the award was never given again.
  • Two Best Director awards were given, one for drama and one for comedy. Starting with the second Oscars, only one directing award was given out.
  • For the first three Academy Awards, the Best Actor and Best Actress awards were given for the best body of work within a year (rather than an individual performance in a film), and the winners of the awards would announce the same category that they won in for the next ceremony. The latter stopped because Norma Shearer was nominated two years in a row (she was nominated in 1931, after winning in 1930), which put her in a potentially awkward position of naming herself the winner. Ever since they've been announced by the previous year's winner of the opposite-gender category.
  • The first eight Awards only had Best Actor and Actress categories, in which roles of any size could be nominated. The Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards were added in 1936 due to the awkwardness of Mutiny on the Bounty eating up three of the five Best Actor spots.
  • The awards for screenwriting went through serious growing pains over almost 30 years. The first awards actually had a similar setup to what they ultimately settled on with awards for Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay, but then they were condensed to just a single Best Writing award for the second and third years, then were split again into Best Original Story and Best Screenplay (the latter of which could also include original screenplays, as they were typically written by a different person then who came up with the story itself). Finally, 1957 was the first time the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay as they still exist were presented.
  • Wings won an award for "Best Engineering Effects", but the Academy wouldn't issue another effects-related Oscar for a decade. While an effects award of some kind was given out every year after 1939, it wouldn't be a regular competitive category until 1991, with several years of only two nominees if there was a competition at all.
• There were no nominees for the second ceremony. The listed nominees are unofficial and were taken from people and works that the Academy considered. This ceremony also introduced the first award for Best Sound.
• It is possible to get a tie in Oscar competition. The first split was for Best Actor in 1931-32, between Wallace Beery for The Champ and Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; March actually won by one vote, but the rules dictated that such a close result should be split. The rules have since been changed, and now it requires an exact match in vote count. A tie has happened five times since then, roughly every two decades and mostly in the smaller categories—except, famously, in 1968, when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand split Best Actress.
• Nearly every discontinued category at the Oscars has been the result of merging categories. From the 1930s through the 1960s, many tech categories were split into separate races for black-and-white and color films. In the '30s, shorts briefly had their own categories for comedy and "novelty", followed by two decades where there were different categories for one-reel and two-reel length shorts. Sound was split into separate categories for Mixing and Editing from 1963-2019. However, no category has had a more confusing history of divisions than Score, which has at different periods been split into separate categories for musicals vs. non-musicals, drama vs. comedy/musicals, original vs. adaptation, and (most confusingly in the '30s and '40s) "Scoring" vs. "Original Score". The Academy finally gave up trying with multiple scoring categories in the 21st century.
  • Besides the aforementioned inaugural "Title Writing" award, the only categories that have been definitively axed rather than just merged together were Assistant Director and Dance Direction, both issued for a few years in the '30s before being pushed out by the directors' branch. Despite numerous efforts in the decades since, there's never been a successful revival of another "Best Choreography" category (though Oliver! (1968) did receive an honorary award for its dance choreography).
• Three films hold the record for 11 Oscar wins: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Of these three, Titanic (1997) was nominated for 14 categories, a record tied only by All About Eve and La La Land until Sinners surpassed that mark with 16 nominations in 2025 (helped by the addition of a new Casting category; the only possible category they missed was Lead Actress, where none of the cast ran). Return of the King won every category in which it was nominated, while Ben-Hur only missed on Screenplay. The next film with the most wins is West Side Story, which won 10.
  • The relative rarity of double-digit wins can be explained both by voters wanting to spread the love and the increasing rarity of big-budget epics and blockbusters, which tend to do well in "below-the-line" categories, that also feature the kind of "above-the-line" scripts and performances commonly viewed as "serious" and "Oscar-worthy".
  • On that note, there's also the fact there were fewer categories in the early years of the awards; it wasn't until 1934 where a feature film even could get double-digit nominations/wins. Cimarron was the first and only film to be nominated in every possible category (in 1931, there were only seven)^note Some sources claim that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? also met this criteria with its 13 nominations in 1966, but it merely received nominations in every category it was eligible; it did not achieve nominations in Original Song, Special Effects, or Sound Effects because it did not have them (or, in sound's case, not enough to qualify). and was the first to win more than two Oscars (for Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Art Direction).
  • Previous record-setters for most Oscar wins are It Happened One Night (5), Gone with the Wind (8), and Gigi (9, also the record for the largest sweep of nominations before Return of the King). Prior record setters for most nominations are Mutiny on the Bounty (8), The Life of Émile Zola (10), and Gone With The Wind (13).
• Only three films have won all of the "Big Five" awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay): It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Silence of the Lambs. Conversely, only five have won Best Picture without winning any other Big Five awards, all before the U.S. entered World War II.^note Those would be Wings (1927), The Broadway Melody, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Rebecca (1940).
• Everything Everywhere All at Once won more awards in the above-the-line categories (Picture, Director, and the Acting and Screenplay awards) than any film in the ceremony's history, with six of the possible seven. The only category it missed out on, Best Actor, was because the film didn't have an eligible nominee (the male performer with the most screen time was nominated and won for Supporting). This came despite it being a sci-fi/action film (see those genres' historical difficulties below). Ironically, its low budget meant that it performed far less well below the line than most critically acclaimed genre pictures, with only a win in Editing.
• As mentioned, Walt Disney holds the record for both the most nominations and wins by a single person, 59 and 22, respectively. Walt also holds the record for the most wins in one night, grabbing four awards in 1954 for four separate films.^note Best Feature Documentary for The Living Desert, Best Short Documentary for The Alaskan Eskimo, Best Short Cartoon for Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom, and Best Two-Reel Short for Bear Country. He was nominated for two other shorts in the same categories that night, making him also the individual with the most nominations at a single ceremony.
  • John Williams follows just behind Disney as the 2nd most Oscar-nominated person, with Williams racking up a whopping 53 nominations over a record six decades. Williams surpassed fellow composer Alfred Newman in nominations (45) but not in wins (11 to Williams' 5). Newman remains the third winningest individual at the Oscars, and his extended family (Lionel, Randy, and Thomas) have racked up an impressive number of wins and nominations themselves.
  • Edith Head holds the record for most wins (8) and nominations (35) by a woman, amassed over a three decade career as Hollywood's preeminent costume designer with over 400 credits to her name; she was nominated at least once in each of the first 18 years of the award's existence.
  • Sean Baker matched Disney's record for most Oscar wins in a single night with four for Anora in 2025, becoming the first person to individually win four Oscars for the same film in a single ceremony (Director, Original Screenplay, Editing and sharing Picture as co-producer^note with Samantha Quan and Alex Coco).
  • Songwriter Diane Warren has the most career nominations without a win (17), having received a nod for Original Song every year since 2017. The vast majority of these recent nominations have been for obscure films and documentaries that received little other commercial or critical attention or Oscar nominations. This has led many to speculate that her nominations have been due more to her personal popularity and relentless campaigning with the Academy's relatively small Songwriting branch than the overall quality of the songs; her 2025 nomination was notably a song written for a documentary about herself that is partially about her desire for an Academy Award.
  • Composer Victor Young was nominated 21 times for Best Score before receiving any award, though his case was slightly different from Warren's, as the Oscars once permitted an unlimited number of nominees for Score, allowing Young to rack up as many as four nominations in a given year. Still, Young passed away without having won an Oscar, only to posthumously be granted one for his work in Around the World in 80 Days (1956).
• There have been seven films that went winless despite receiving 10 or more nominations: The Turning Point (1977), The Color Purple (1985) (the co-record holders with 11 nominations), Gangs of New York, True Grit (2010), American Hustle, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon (all with 10). Note that Martin Scorsese directed three of the seven.
  • Turning Point and The Color Purple are tied for most Oscar "losses" (nominations without wins—though isn't it an honor just to be nominated?) at 11 with Johnny Belinda, Becket, and The Power of the Dog (which went 1 for 12) and Emilia Pérez (2 for 13).
• The Academy instated a right of first refusal agreement in 1950, stating that any recipient who wanted to sell their award (or their heirs) had first to allow the Academy to repurchase it for $10. This amount was later changed to $1 in the 1980s.^note Non-professional actor Harold Russell famously sold his competitive Oscar to pay for his wife's medical expenses; he was exempt from the agreement since he was a pre-1950 winner. A small metal plaque bolted to the rear of every Oscar states that the statue cannot be transferred.^note A few Oscars from before the prohibition occasionally hit the open market. Steven Spielberg bought Bette Davis's 1938 Oscar for Jezebel for $578,000.
• James Ivory is the oldest person to win an Oscar, with Call Me by Your Name winning Best Adapted Screenplay at age 89. John Williams currently holds the record for the oldest Oscar nominee at 92 for his nomination for Best Original Score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Before that, the oldest nominee was the late Agnès Varda for her documentary Faces Places. Varda still holds the record for the oldest female to be nominated for an Oscar. In addition, she was also eight days Ivory's senior, with both of them nominated at the 90th Academy Awards.
• Two people have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize in Literature: George Bernard Shaw (1925 Nobel Laureate, won Best Adapted Screenplay in 1939 for the film version of his play Pygmalion) and Bob Dylan (2016 Nobel Laureate, won Best Original Song in 2001 for "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys).
• John Ford holds the record for most wins of Best Director (4, for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Quiet Man). The only other directors with three such wins are William Wyler (who received the most nominations of any director, 12) and Frank Capra.
  • The oldest person to win Best Director—and only winner even in their 70s—is Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby; Martin Scorsese is the only 80+ year old nominee, getting the nod for Killers of the Flower Moon. Damien Chazelle (32) is the youngest Best Director winner for La La Land, winning at just a few months younger than Norman Taurog had been when he won for Skippy 86 years before. The youngest director nominee is John Singleton, who at just 24 years old got the nod for directing Boyz n the Hood in 1994. Orson Welles had held that record for half a century before then for directing Citizen Kane.
  • Singleton was also the first Black person nominated for Best Director; no Black artist has ever won that prize, though 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight (2016) won Best Picture under the direction of Black artists.
  • Even after nearly a century of awards, you can still count the number of women director nominees on your fingers. The first, Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, didn't come until 1975; the next two came decades later (Jane Campion in 1993 and Sofia Coppola in 2003). The first winner, Kathryn Bigelow, was only the fourth woman nominee; her victory for The Hurt Locker in 2009 famously involved her beating out her ex-husband James Cameron (for Avatar)^note Cameron had already won three Oscars for Titanic (1997).. The next winner, 2020-21's Chloé Zhao with Nomadland (which also won Best Picture), was the first and only woman of color to be nominated. A year later, Campion's win for The Power of the Dog made her the first woman to be nominated twice (Zhao would join her a few years later with Hamnet) and marked the first time women had won Best Director in two consecutive years. While these changes indicate a shift, it remains a small one. To put it bluntly, the Oscars would have to nominate almost exclusively women for over a century to even the scales, and they have only nominated more than one woman in a year once (2020-21).
  • Ang Lee was the first Asian (and non-Caucasian) person to win Best Director for Brokeback Mountain (2005); he remains the sole Asian director to win twice (for Life of Pi in 2011) and be nominated three times (for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
  • Four directors have been nominated twice in the same year. Three of these nominations came in the first eleven ceremonies, after which the rules were amended for many decades to prevent doubles. When Steven Soderbergh became the only director since 1939 to receive dual nods in 2000 for Traffic and Erin Brockovich, many weren't even aware the rules allowed for it. Rather than split the vote, this impressive feat may have helped Soderbergh win for Traffic in a year Best Picture went to Gladiator.
• Many have questioned what the distinction even is between Best Picture and Best Director—while producers are undoubtedly crucial for the creation of a given film, voters are pretty unlikely to be considering those efforts when deciding what their favorite film is. You can see that reflected in the results; over 70% of Best Picture winners also won Best Director, only six films won Best Picture without at least a Best Director nomination (Wings (1927), Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, Argo, Green Book, and CODA), and only Lewis Milestone and Frank Lloyd won Director for films not nominated in Picture (and those were in the second and third ceremonies when the rules were still being hashed out).
• The distinction between the Original and Adapted Screenplay categories are clear enough on paper, but the rationale for dividing them has occasionally been questioned. Several Original winners have been nominated or won for writing a screenplay for a Biopic or historical drama that adapts Real Life and likely draws from many other works indirectly (and sometimes pretty directly), while Adapted winners and nominees sometimes significantly diverge from the source material and may be almost wholly "original" beyond the title and the names of some characters. Likewise, any movie that is a sequel or prequel to an original screenplay is considered an adaptation, even if the story is entirely new (the argument being that it borrows continuity, characters, and motifs from the preceding film). The reason for the keeping the split despite the murkiness is usually attributed to the Academy wanting to elevate original scripts, which rarely receive big budgets or studio support.
  • There's also a minor bit of controversy about how both Screenplay awards tend to honor the quality of the final film rather than the original screenplay on the page; there's usually pretty significant revisions between the screenplay and shooting script, and the edit has a massive impact on how that story is told.
• The record holder for wins (3) and nominations (16) in Original Screenplay is Woody Allen, who famously never attended the Oscars except to deliver a post-9/11 tribute to New York City. A few other writers have received three awards across both Original and Adapted.
• The youngest writers to win Best Original Screenplay were Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who were 25 years old when they won for Good Will Hunting and were launched into far greater fame as actors (though, notably, neither have yet won an Oscar in their more famous line of work).
• Rick Baker was the first competitive winner of the award for Best Makeup in 1981 for An American Werewolf in London; he holds the record for most wins (7) and nominations (11) in the category. The first new category in nearly two decades, it was introduced after outrage that The Elephant Man had not been awarded the prior year, despite the fact that 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and Planet of the Apes (1968) had earlier been given honorary awards in the category.
• Dennis Muren holds the most wins (8) and nominations (15) for Visual Effects for his contributions to groundbreaking special effects in the Star Wars original trilogy, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Jurassic Park (1993) (among others).
• 2022's All Quiet on the Western Front holds the record for nine nominations for a German film, beating the original record holder, Das Boot (another World War film with "War Is Hell" as its central theme, interestingly), with six nominations.
• City of God and The Secret Agent (2025) are tied at four for the most nominations for a Brazilian film; City of God infamously wasn't nominated for Best International Feature.
• The only non-acting category a single film can receive multiple nominations in is Original Song. Four films have received three nominations in the same year: Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), Dreamgirls, and Enchanted.
• Every year, the Academy's Board of Governors gives honorary Oscars to a few individuals (and sometimes groups). For the first several decades of the ceremony, these were usually awards given to commemorate accomplishments in the year and film that were not recognized by other categories. As the Academy fleshed out its technical categories, they pivoted towards giving these out to honor the entire career of actors, directors, and other artists who had not previously won an Oscar (famously, Peter O'Toole received one after setting a record for nominations by an actor without a win). From the 1970s to the 2000s, the Academy usually gave out just one of these each year and presented the speech during the telecast. In 2009, they pivoted to giving out three per year but at a separate Governors Awards ceremony, showing only a few short clips during the telecast.

Best Picture Categories

• From 1945 until 2009, the Best Picture Oscar went to the film that received the most votes. The 2009 Academy Awards returned to the original voting format: voters ranked the nominated films from best to worst, and then the votes were tallied to determine which film won the award. One could argue that this was done to ensure all the nominated films were on a level playing field and, along with the extra five nominations, help placate those who complained about the Best Picture snubs from the 2008 awards.
• Cabaret won more Oscars than any other film that didn't also win Best Picture (8); it was up against The Godfather that year. La La Land had the most nominees of any film not to win Best Picture with its then-record 14 nods, losing out to Moonlight (2016). The Bad and the Beautiful won more awards (5) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? received more nominations (9) than any film not to even be nominated for Best Picture, while several films in the Oscars' early history were nominated in Best Picture and nowhere else (Grand Hotel actually won the prize in 1931-32).
• Bong Joon-ho's Parasite in 2020 is the first and currently only non-English language film to win Best Picture; eight films from the United Kingdom and one from France have won before it from outside of the United States, but all of those were in English. In his acceptance speech, he notably mentioned that the Oscars are a provincial award in the rest of the world. (Interestingly, Parasite remains the only South Korean film nominated at the Oscars.) Indeed, the Academy's relationship to world cinema has long been questioned and scrutinized:
  • While the Academy was founded in the United States, it is not an expressly American institution, and no rules limit the main categories based on national origin. However, its members are overwhelmingly American, and as a result, the films it nominates are overwhelmingly American (or at least written and performed in English). Complaints about the awards' lack of diversity (see below) have contributed to the Academy's gradual expansion of its international membership, which may be reflected in the slightly more diverse nominations of recent years.
  • The International Feature Film category (formerly known as "Best Foreign Language Film", but still holds the requirement that nominees are primarily non-English) is notorious for its extremely complicated rules, including the requirement that a country can only submit one film to the Academy for nomination consideration. It's also subject to the rules about television airings; Japan wanted to submit Shall We Dance? in 1997, but it had already had a TV airing in its home country and was disqualified. (They submitted Princess Mononoke instead; it didn't get a nomination.)^note The corresponding Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for films not in English do not restrict nominations by country; films are submitted for those awards by producers. Also, the Golden Globes allow American productions in non-English languages to be nominated; BAFTA has the same rule for British productions. Two American productions have won the Golden Globe in this category (Letters from Iwo Jima and Minari), and two British productions have won the corresponding BAFTA (In This World and The Zone of Interest). The category was created in 1956 to expand the Oscars' influence worldwide, but it also likely had the side effect of siloing international nominees into that single category.
  • The category has also been highly tilted towards honoring European films over those from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. France and Italy far outpace all other countries in both wins (12 and 14) and nominations (43 and 33). Japan is a distant third in wins (5) and fourth in noms (18), but it also stands far above all other non-European countries; it's had nearly twice as many nominations as its nearest non-European runner-up (Israel), as of 2025 has 15 more noms than the next most represented Asian nations (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India), and has more wins than all Spanish-speaking nations combined. The entire continent of Africa has only won thrice, each of which (Z, Black and White in Color, and Tsotsi) was directed by a White man.
  • While there are some Best International Feature Films that also got into Best Picture, only three country representatives got a nomination back to back: Sweden ^note The Emigrants, Cries and Whispers, France ^note Anatomy of a Fall, Emilia Pérez and Brazil ^note  I'm Still Here (2024), The Secret Agent (2025)
  • Emilia Pérez is the most nominated foreign language film (13), though it does feature some scenes in English. It notably has the fewest wins of any film with 13+ nominations at just two, though that likely has more to do with a critical backlash towards the movie that occurred around the time of nominations; the film lost International Film to I'm Still Here (2024).
• The genres the Academy likes best are the Epic Movie, the period drama, the contemporary drama, and the Biopic. In its early years, The Musical was extremely successful, though this waned (along with the genre's general popularity) after the 1960s. Pure genre works that win Oscars, especially Best Picture, are highly rare:
  • The Return of the King's 2003 sweep showed the Academy is willing to give a serious look to genre films as worthy of the Academy's highest honors in writing and directing, in addition to the technical awards that such films usually garner. Still, the lack of awards recognition for any other high fantasy films suggests it might be the exception that proves the rule.^note The fact that The Lord of the Rings had such a significant literary pedigree before being adapted probably didn't hurt matters much. Additionally, the Academy was criticized for not awarding the first two films in the trilogy similar honors, and King's sweep is almost universally considered a recognition of the trilogy's accomplishments as a whole, rather than just one film.
  • The victories of Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven in The '90s are seen as a belated acknowledgment of The Western as a serious genre, years after the genre's peak in popularity (as only three period Westerns have won Best Picture, the other being Cimarron way back in 1931).
  • The crime genre (Gangster, Film Noir, and Police Procedural) never won top honours until In the Heat of the Night in The '60s (followed by The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, and The Godfather Part II in The '70s). But this era was very much an exception, as only one other straight crime movie, The Departed, has won Best Picture since. Other examples of dark/gritty genre movies winning Oscar glory are The Silence of the Lambs (a horror-thriller film about a Serial Killer that features an FBI agent as the protagonist) and Rebecca (1940) (a gothic thriller and the only Alfred Hitchcock film to win Best Picture).
  • Horror is likewise almost completely shut out every year at the Oscars, and wins are sporadic. Nearly every horror film nominated for the Oscars (including the most successful example in Silence of the Lambs, the only one to win Best Picture) has dipped its toes in other genres and/or been recognized solely for technical achievements like makeup. Above-the-line wins for other horror/horror-adjacent movies can be counted on your fingers: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist (1973), Misery, Black Swan, and Get Out. However, the most nominated film ever at the Oscars was 2025's Sinners, though that film dabbles in many other genres as well and was one of the biggest box office hits in the U.S. that year.
  • The Comedy Ghetto also applies for Best Picture, with It Happened One Night, You Can't Take It With You, and Annie Hall as arguably the only "pure" comedies to ever win Best Picture. Other possible examples are comedic Period Piece movies Tom Jones and Shakespeare in Love; Dramedy winners like The Apartment, Forrest Gump, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and Anora; Parasite (2019) (which has Black Comedy and tragicomedy elements); and Everything Everywhere All at Once (which is Genre-Busting but could basically count as a Fantastic Comedy).
  • Science fiction often receives recognition in the technical categories and can sometimes even take home the most statues at a given ceremony as a result, like with Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune (2021), but the genre rarely competes in Best Picture, with only three such films (A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) nominated in the awards' first 80 years. It wasn't until the category expanded the number of nominees in 2010 that they started competing more regularly, with both Avatar and District 9 being nominated that year, although neither won. The Shape of Water, a romantic science-fantasy film, finally won Best Picture in 2017, and 2022's Everything Everywhere All at Once followed suit.
  • The superhero genre has historically struggled to gain recognition for the Oscars. While many are nominated for technical categories like Best Visual Effects, very few win those awards. When it comes to the major categories, The Dark Knight was infamously snubbed for a Best Picture nomination in 2008, though it did get a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination for Heath Ledger, which it won. Since then, Black Panther and Joker have managed to garner Best Picture nominations and significant attention in the major categories, with Joaquin Phoenix winning Best Actor for Joker, but neither film won Best Picture. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also received many nominations in 2022, but not one for Best Picture. Three superhero films have also won the Best Animated Feature award: The Incredibles, Big Hero 6, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Incredibles 2 was also nominated, but lost to Spider-Verse. Logan was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2017 but didn't win.
  • Sequels are usually looked down upon in favor of more "original" (or at least standalone) works. Return of the King and The Godfather Part II are the only direct sequels to win Best Picture;^note Silence of the Lambs is sometimes cited, since it is an adaptation of a book that was a sequel whose predecessor was also adapted into a film, but those films had no other connections on their creative teams. both of their predecessors had been nominated for Best Picture, and both of the winners outperformed their predecessors in wins and nominations. Sequels to Oscar nominated films typically follow a reverse pattern where there are rapidly diminishing returns as a franchise proceeds even if critical and audience reception remains warm; Star Wars and Dune (2021) were massive successes at the Oscars, but the Academy was far less generous to The Empire Strikes Back and Dune: Part Two with nominations and wins. Mad Max: Fury Road is the only sequel Best Picture nominee whose franchise had never previously received an Oscar nomination. It joins Toy Story 3, Black Panther, and Top Gun: Maverick as the only nominees whose predecessors had not also been nominated for Best Picture.
    • Observers will often cite Return of the King to explain why franchise films regularly underperform, arguing that Oscar voters are awaiting the Grand Finale to award the entire franchise (The Two Towers famously received far fewer nominations and wins than its predecessor or successor, which was attributed to voters knowing that Return of the King would be released the following year). While this long-term view may play into some voters' mindsets, it's worth noting that Return of the King is the only time this has ever happened (Godfather Part II performed about as well as its predecessor would have if it hadn't been up against Cabaret).
• While commercial blockbusters tend to not be nominated in major categories (with the common refrain being that the awards are for artistic merit rather than financial success and that most producers prefer a hit to a statue), true financial phenomenons historically do tend to bring in nominations and awards. Titanic is the highest grossing film to win Best Picture; it was the highest grossing film ever when it won, and that Oscar telecast remains the most viewed of all time. Critics of the Oscars' slipping ratings often cite this as a reason why more populist movies should get Academy attention, but eight of the ten highest grossing films of all time when adjusted for inflation have been nominated for Best Picture (the lone exceptions being The Force Awakens and Avengers: Endgame; see the above note about Oscars and sequels), and all-time ticket-seller Gone with the Wind swept the Oscars like few other films before or since.
• Though the first animated feature film was given an honorary Oscar, animated films have struggled at the Awards. While Disney's Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture in 1991, most animated films were unable to be nominated for any category outside of Best Original Score and Song until the Best Animated Film category was introduced in 2001, the first entirely new category in two decades. Even this was something of a compromise, as some Academy members advocated for the category to be made explicitly so that animation could be siloed off and wouldn't be nominated in Best Picture again; since the award's creation, only two (Up and Toy Story 3) have returned to the category, both only after the number of Best Picture nominations was increased. Many categories, including Director, Editing, Production Design, and all Acting categories, have never featured an animated film nomination, and Pixar's run of screenplay nominations in the 2000s is the only major exception to animation's exclusion from the "big kids" table. To date, The Incredibles remains the only animated film to win an Oscar outside of Best Animated Feature or the Music categories when it won for Sound Editing in 2005.
  • Those who work in animation have also criticized the Academy for favoring a certain type of film in their nominations and winners for Animated Feature: computer-generated Western films primarily marketed to children and produced by Disney (or its subsidiary, Pixar). To date, Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron, and Flow are the only non-Western animated films to win the category. The former two are also the only traditionally animated films to win, with The Boy and the Heron arguably being the award's most "mature" winner. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio are the only stop-motion winners. Pixar alone has won almost half of the Animated Feature Oscars, and Disney proper is the runner-up in the win category; they and DreamWorks Animation combine for more than half of the nominations as well.
  • Back when theatrical cartoons were a major box office draw, the Animated Short Subject award was one that studios clamored for. Since those became associated with television and home video they became associated with television and home video, Animated Short nominees are most likely to be independent avant-garde subjects that most people are unlikely to see outside of the festival circuit, unless the studio that produced them later becomes famous.
• The award for Best Documentary Feature has also suffered from having a rather strange set of rules — documentaries can be disqualified for airing on TV too soon as well as for involving the use of too much archival footage^note A documentary built primarily around archival footage would eventually win the award in 2022 with Summer of Soul. Additionally, until Bowling for Columbine won in 2002, it was rare for any Academy Award-winning documentary to be available to the general public. Five of the six winners before Bowling for Columbine all involved Jews being killed as a result of antisemitism. While there's nothing wrong with that (the films, not antisemitism), people would probably raise eyebrows if Best Picture winners had this level of topic frequency. And before that, there was the infamous Hoop Dreams snub of 1994.
  • Since Bowling for Columbine, though, the award has come under the same scrutiny as most other major categories, and most winners, while not as famous as An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins, can usually be found at your local dollar store.
  • The nature of the category also allows for some oddities, such as installments of non-American television series being nominated as long as the documentaries haven't aired in the US; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's current affairs program The Fifth Estate received several such nominations as a result. Multi-part and limited series were originally eligible for the documentary feature award but were eventually made ineligible after the contentious victory of the nearly 8-hour O.J.: Made in America in 2017.
  • The first "Best Documentary" award was given to both feature films and short subjects, featuring four winners and 24 nominees. Starting in 1943, the second time the award was given, the Academy made a distinction between features and short subjects.
• There have been four films that won both Best Picture and the Palme d'Or, often regarded as the top prize in international cinema. They are The Lost Weekend, Marty, Parasite, and Anora.
• Gone with the Wind is the longest Best Picture winner, at 221 minutes,^note Though, if you add the overture, intermission, entr'acte, and exit sections to the tally, it times out to 238 minutes. while Marty is the shortest at 91 minutes^note Some sources say 90 or 93.; only two other Best Picture winners run less than 100 minutes, Annie Hall (93 minutes) and Driving Miss Daisy (99 minutes).
• Gone with the Wind was also the first color film to win Best Picture, with its 1939 sweep of the awards helping to herald the arrival of color films as a dominant force in Hollywood. However, it took another decade for a color film to win the top prize (An American in Paris in 1951); color and black-and-white films shared the award for the next decade until The Apartment won in 1960, after which black-and-white mostly disappeared from the landscape. Since The Apartment, only Schindler's List and The Artist have won Best Picture while being filmed in (mostly) black-in-white.
• Oliver! (1968) is the only Best Picture winner to receive a G rating. The very next year, Midnight Cowboy became the only X-rated film to win the same award.
• Adaptations have historically won Best Picture roughly twice as often as wholly original works. There are a few reasons for that: original works are relatively uncommon in Hollywood as a whole and much less likely to get a significant budget and attention unless helmed by a major star or director or "adapting" a well-known historical event or biography. When compared to the industry as a whole, though, original films tend to get better treatment at the Oscars than they do at the box office, in part due to them getting their own category and in part due to the respect they're given for their creators' artistic visions.
• Roughly two-thirds of Best Picture winners also win for Screenplay; the overlap would be even more notable if not for the weirdness of the Oscars' first decade. Only seven have not even been nominated; the last was Titanic, and the only other since the 1940s was The Sound of Music.

Acting Categories

• Katharine Hepburn won more Oscars than any other performer, winning Best Actress four times. Making her accomplishment all the more impressive is the longevity of her career; she won her first award for Morning Glory in 1933, won two more back-to-back decades later for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968), and won her final prize in 1981 for On Golden Pond as the then-oldest Best Actress winner ever (now second oldest). The 48-year gap between her first and last win is a record as well. Despite her tremendous popularity with the Academy, who nominated her eight additional times, Hepburn (in)famously never attended the ceremony as a competitor, only appearing once to give an award to a friend (during which she wore gardening clothes). Fittingly, Cate Blanchett later won a Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Hepburn in The Aviator, the only time a portrayal of an Oscar winner won one.
• Meryl Streep holds the record for most acting nominations by a considerable margin at 21 (a record 17 for Lead Actress, plus 4 for Supporting). Her nearest runner-ups only have 12 (that would be the aforementioned Hepburn and Jack Nicholson), followed by early Oscar record-setter Bette Davis (11, with her first being a write-in for Of Human Bondage).
  • Davis' total comes in part from her still-record streak of five straight nominations from 1938-42. This streak coincided with the only other five-year run from Greer Garson (1941-45); both won just one award in that streak. Only Marlon Brando (four straight for Best Actor from 1951-54, culminating in his win for On the Waterfront) and Thelma Ritter (four straight from 1950-53 in Supporting Actress) have come close to those runs in the same category, while Jennifer Jones (1943-46) and Al Pacino (1972-75) did so across Lead and Supporting.
• Daniel Day-Lewis is the only performer to win Best Actor three times (for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, and Lincoln).
• Of the seven actors to win three or more acting awards,^note Besides Hepburn, Nicholson, Streep, and Day-Lewis, the other members of this exclusive club are Ingrid Bergman and Frances McDormand. only Walter Brennan won all three (or even two) in Supporting. Brennan won all three awards for his first three nominations, all in the span of just five years for Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938), and The Westerner (1940). This was seen at the time as a bit of a problem because Brennan wasn't necessarily a huge name; his wins were attributed to the Academy giving a vote for awards to the extras' union, where Brennan was apparently quite popular. They changed the rules after his third win to exclude extras, and Brennan got just one more nomination for the rest of his career.
• Robert De Niro has the longest gap between his first and last nomination of any performer, earning his first in 1974 for his winning performance in The Godfather Part II and his most recent in 2023 for Killers of the Flower Moon, a 49-year gap that edged out Hepburn by one year.
• Judd Hirsch holds the record for the longest gap between two Oscar nominations at 42 years. His first was for Ordinary People in 1980, and his second was for The Fabelmans in 2022. The longest gap for an actress is Amy Madigan, with a 40 year gap between her first nomination for Twice in a Lifetime in 1985 and her second for Weapons in 2025. Coincidentally, she was the only nomination both films received.
• Laurence Olivier and Spencer Tracy are tied for most nominations as Best Actor at nine apiece. The aforementioned Thelma Ritter has the most nominations for Supporting Actress (6); several men have gotten four in Supporting Actor.
• Peter O'Toole and Glenn Close both accumulated eight acting nominations (O'Toole all in Lead, Close split evenly between Lead and Supporting) without ever taking home gold. Close still has a shot to break or extend that streak. Al Pacino and Geraldine Page were both nominated seven times before getting their first wins (for Scent of a Woman and The Trip to Bountiful, respectively).
• While the Oscars' lack of representation of international cinema can be explained by its base nation, the awards historically have not been very representative of the population of the United States more broadly:
  • Academy Award nominees have overwhelmingly been of European descent throughout their history. For the first several decades of the ceremony, nominees were almost exclusively White. Hattie McDaniel, the first Black person to win an acting award in 1939, had to sit at a segregated table during the ceremony. While things have improved considerably since then, it's still common for several awards every year to have exclusively White nominee slates, and it's even rarer for more than one person of color to be nominated on the same slate.
    • This has an impact on the diversity of the winners. Notably, it took until 2002 for Halle Berry to become the first person of color to win Best Actress. It took another two decades for Michelle Yeoh to win, and Berry remains the only Black woman to have claimed the award. Lily Gladstone is the only Native American ever even nominated in the category.
    • Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Viola Davis, and Anthony Quinn are the only non-white actors with more than three career acting nominations on a list with over 100 white actors (Washington has nine, Freeman five, Davis and Quinn four).
    • Washington and Mahershala Ali are the only Black two-time winners, and Quinn is the only Latino two-time winner; Washington is the only two-time winner in Lead.
  • Japanese-American Miyoshi Umeki became the first East Asian woman to win an acting award in 1957 when she won Supporting Actress for Sayonara. It took 63 years for the Korean Youn Yuh-jung to win for Minari and become the second.
  • The division of acting awards into male and female categories has been questioned by certain commentators and even smaller awards bodies for years. Criticism comes from both those who think that all the actors should compete with each other regardless of gender and those who believe the binary division has led to the exclusion of trans and nonbinary performers. However, the Oscars have been in no hurry to remove the gender division, largely because of concerns that the Acting category would follow the pattern of all the other categories and become much less diverse and more male-dominant. Cisgender men dominate almost every other category in nominations and wins by a wide margin (up until 2017, there were categories that had never nominated a woman), and any progress on that front has been much too slow for most women in the Academy to support eliminating the dedicated Actress categories.
  • Non-English performances, especially from non-Hollywood films, are also rarely recognized at the Oscars, and it's even more rare that they win. As with international films in general, there is a heavy slant towards Europe in these nominations; you can count the number of actor nominations from films produced in Latin America on one hand, and no actor from a film produced in Asia or Africa has ever been nominated.
    • Interestingly, while a few dozen international performances have been nominated in Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actress, and three have won in Lead—Sophia Loren in Two Women (1961), Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful (1998), and Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose (2007)—it would take until 2025 for the Supporting Actor category to even receive a nomination for a performance in an international film (that being for Sentimental Value's Stellan Skarsgård, an actor with a long career in English language films and television and who speaks English in parts of the film).
    • Italian Marcello Mastroianni is the only international actor to be nominated thrice for non-English performances.
• In 2008, the late Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, a first for a superhero film, sparking a debate about whether his death played a role in the win. Ledger was only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar; the first was Peter Finch, who won for Best Actor in 1976 for Network. Curiously, both actors were Australian.
  • Ledger is also among the seven acting performances from movies based on a comic book/graphic novel that were nominated for an Oscar which include Jackie Cooper for Skippy, Al Pacino for Dick Tracy (1990), Paul Newman for Road to Perdition, William Hurt for A History of Violence, Joaquin Phoenix for Joker (2019), and Angela Bassett for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
• There have been three times in which two actors won an Oscar for playing the same character in separate films: Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro as Vito Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix as The Joker in The Dark Knight and Joker, and Rita Moreno and Ariana DeBose as Anita in the 1961 and 2021 film adaptations of West Side Story.
  • There have also been three instances in which two actors were nominated for playing the same character in the same film. These were Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart as Rose in Titanic, Winslet again and Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch in Iris, and Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter.
• There have been plenty of actors to be nominated for and win Oscars for playing musicians. Four have won acting Oscars for portraying artists with a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray was the first, and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody is the most recent. The other two are less obvious: Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line (her duet with Johnny Cash on "If I Were a Carpenter" reached #36 in 1970) and Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley in Green Book (Shirley's Instrumental version of the Folk Music standard "Water Boy" reached #40 in 1961). (What about Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter? Lynn's success was confined to the Country Music chart. She never made it past #70 on the Hot 100.)
• While there have been many examples of straight actors being recognized for playing a queer character (or a queer actor being recognized for playing a straight character), there have only been six instances of Queer Character, Queer Actor being nominated: Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game, Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters, Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Colman Domingo in Rustin, Jodie Foster in Nyad, and Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez (Gascón also being the only openly trans actor ever nominated). Four of those six noms came in the 2020s (the other two are from the 1990s), indicating the degree of exclusion through most of the ceremony's history and the cultural shifts in recent years; none of those nominees have won the award.
• While several winners have refused to go to the ceremony to accept the award in person, such as Woody Allen and Katharine Hepburn, there are two instances of a nominee flat-out rejecting the award, usually to make a point:
  • George C. Scott won an Oscar for his seminal performance as Gen. George S. Patton in the epic biopic Patton. Scott had nothing but contempt for the Oscar ceremony, decrying it as a "two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons." The movie's producer, Frank McCarthy, accepted the award on Scott's behalf.
  • Marlon Brando rejected the second Oscar he won for The Godfather. Instead, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American activist-actress^note Shortly after her death in 2022, Littlefeather's alleged Native ancestry was revealed to be a fraud, stimulating further controversy decades after the incident. and president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, to the ceremony. Claiming to be the actor's representative, Littlefeather said that Brando was turning down the Oscar, citing the treatment of American Indians in the film industry. In the statement published by The New York Times the next day, Brando said: "The motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile, and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children ... see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know."
• The nomination process for Academy Awards for Lead Performers and Supporting Performers is highly politicized to say the least and often prone to cries of Award Category Fraud. The process requires performers, typically but not always in consultation with producers and directors, submitting their role for consideration in a given category, but the voters make the ultimate decision on what category the performance goes in. The Academy doesn't prescribe either an absolute runtime or runtime percentage limit for actors considered for leading roles, and much depends on the inclination of voters to consider whether performances "count" as leads. This creates some... interesting outcomes.
  • The clearest example of voters themselves not being able to distinguish between Lead and Supporting was when Barry Fitzgerald was nominated in both categories in 1944 for the same performance in Going My Way (he won in Supporting). This confusion led the Academy to change their rules; now the nominee gets placed in whichever category they get the most votes in. This has led to some odd outcomes: for example, Lakeith Stanfield campaigned in Lead for Judas and the Black Messiah, in part because the favored and eventual winner in Supporting was his co-star Daniel Kaluuya, but wound up being placed in Supporting by the majority of acting branch voters.
  • There have been a few storied examples of actors winning Best Lead Actor or Actress despite only having a somewhat small portion of a given film's runtime that would suggest on paper that they ought to have been considered Supporting roles. David Niven in Separate Tables (23:39 minutes) and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (24:52 minutes) rank for the shortest screentimes for Best Actor winners; Niven has the smallest absolute runtime while Hopkins has the shortest overall share of screentime (21%). Spencer Tracy has the shortest screentime of any Best Actor nominee (14:58 / 12.99%) for San Francisco (1936), ironically awarded the year the Supporting categories were introduced. Many other actors have won Best Actor for famous roles despite having less than 40% of the film's screentime — Marlon Brando for The Godfather (40:10 / 22%), Michael Douglas for Wall Street (40:25 / 32%), Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland (42:34 / 34.63%), and Sean Penn for Mystic River (47:50 / 34.73%). However, since the 2010s, Best Lead Actors have gone exclusively to performers clocking in more than 60 minutes of a film's runtime, and even in The 2000s Penn and Whitaker were outliers.
  • This phenomenon is even more common for Best Actress, where nominations have historically been given to the most prevalent role held by a woman in the cast regardless of whether they are the true "Lead" of the film. Historically, there have been far fewer films with women leads than male leads, and those women-led films are often under-seen and under-nominated by awards bodies. This means that the Best Actress winner is often drawn from films featuring cishet male leads who (along with several male "supporting" actors) often receive far more screentime than their cishet female co-stars. A number of iconic performers with very small screentime have won Best Actress simply because of the lack of other women in their own popular male-led film helping them qualify and compete as a lead; Patricia Neal for Hud (21:51 minutes or 19.58%) and Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (22:37 / 16.96%) both won; Fletcher had the lowest percentage of anyone even nominated in the category. (Some nominees have had even smaller total screentimes: Eleanor Parker got a nod for 20:10 in Detective Story.) Nicole Kidman for The Hours (23:30 / 20.49%) is a unique case, as her film featured a cast of women with equal or more screentime who were otherwise pushed into Supporting. Much as with Best Actor, however, the norm has been tending towards the informal 60 minutes minimum in the 21st century. In The 2000s, only four winners made it to 60 minutes; that number jumped to seven in The New '10s, and since The New '20s every winner has appeared in an hour or more.
    • For those curious: the Lead winners with the most screentime and screenshare are Adrien Brody for The Brutalist (2:08:30), Art Carney for Harry and Tonto (87.13%), Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (2:23:32), and Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle (85.29%). The longest nominated performances are Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street (2:21:07), James Whitmore in Give Em Hell Harry (96.52% in a one-man show), Leigh, and Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years (91.2%).
  • There's also the reverse phenomenon of actors (and especially actresses) campaigning to "jump down" to Supporting purely for the sake of an easier win against competition with less screentime.
    • Eva Marie Saint competed for and won Best Supporting Actress for On the Waterfront despite the fact that her screentime (40:06 / 37.27%) was more than double her fellow nominees that year, but producers felt that the Lead category was too competitive and she'd be a shoo-in in Supporting, a logic which proved correct.
    • Alicia Vikander had been nominated in Lead Actress in other 2015 precursor awards for her role in The Danish Girl and lost out to Brie Larson for Room; she subsequently ran in Supporting Actress for the Oscars and won, setting a record for screentime by an adult winner (59:37 / 49.88%).
    • Mahershala Ali holds the record for total screentime by a Supporting Actor (1:06:38 / 51.28%) for his performance in Green Book.
    • Kieran Culkin was on-screen a whopping 64.88% of A Real Pain, shattering the earlier record for screen-share by a Supporting Actor winner.
    • Zoe Saldaña had the most screentime of any actor in Emilia Pérez but chose to run in Supporting by claiming that the title character was the film's true lead, which helped her win the category.
    • One reason for why many actors choose to run in Supporting when possible was demonstrated by the 2023 race. Emma Stone won Best Actress in something of an upset, given that Lily Gladstone had entered as the favorite for her turn in Killers of the Flower Moon (notably winning the SAG award, typically though not always a bellwether for the Oscar). Defenders pointed out that Stone was the clear female lead for Poor Things (1:37:19 minutes / 68.77%) while Gladstone was in just 27.29% of her film; however, Flower Moon was a very long Epic Movie with a large ensemble cast, and Gladstone's total screentime was much longer than many other Lead winners had been historically. This has been a frequent hurdle for actors from epics; the Lead category heavily favors character-centered dramas.
  • Some Supporting Actors and Actresses have gotten nominations and even wins for being a One-Scene Wonder. The queen of this is Beatrice Straight, who won Supporting Actress for Network for essentially one scene; her screentime was 5:02, just 4.15% of the film's runtime. Network also featured the shortest Supporting Actor performance to be nominated from Ned Beatty, whose six minute monologue made up 4.95% of the runtime (John Lithgow's nominated turn in Terms of Endearment comprised an even shorter 4.91%). The shortest performances by Supporting Actor winners are Ben Johnson for The Last Picture Show for length (9:54 / 7.84%) and Hugh Griffith in Ben-Hur (1959) for percentage (16:51 / 7.57%). The shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar was delivered by Hermione Baddeley, whose three short scenes in Room at the Top barely cracked two minutes, less than 2% of the film.
  • As previously mentioned, the first three Awards nominated actors for their body of work rather than individual performances. Since 1931, the rule has been that actors can now only be nominated for a single performance. This has always been a bit of an odd rule (no other non-acting category has it, and it's actually fairly common for there to be a double nominee in at least one other category each ceremony), but it also only applies per category. Including the aforementioned Barry Fitzgerald, twelve actors have successfully managed to get nominated in both Lead and Supporting in the same ceremony. That has also been a contributing factor to some instances of category fraud and general bizarre occurrences.
    • Seven of the twelve actors nominated twice have won in one of the categories, perhaps supported by voters wanting to celebrate their body of work, but none have ever won both.
    • Jamie Foxx won for Ray in Lead in 2004 the same year that he was nominated in Supporting for Collateral, a film where he had more screentime than any other actor by a sizable margin.
    • This has only happened to two different actors in the same year once, in 1993 for Holly Hunter (The Piano and The Firm) and Emma Thompson (The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father).
    • While actors' teams might be led to campaign for two awards to slightly improve the likelihood of a win, there have been cases where this has backfired. In 2008, Kate Winslet was running a dual campaign for Lead in Revolutionary Road and Supporting in The Reader. Despite winning several precursor awards in both categories, setting her up to potentially be the first actor to win twice in one night, the majority of nominee voters wound up placing her in Lead for The Reader, disqualifying her from being nominated at all for Road even though it's entirely possible that she received more initial votes for Road in Lead. Winslet wound up winning for The Reader despite boasting one of the shortest screentimes of any Lead winner, leaving many wondering What Could Have Been had she been nominated in her preferred categories.
• The age of actors is also an interesting—and often contentious—aspect of the awards:
  • The age of actor nominees and winners is another notably gendered phenomenon. As of 2025, the only Best Actor winner under the age of 30 is Adrien Brody for The Pianist; there have been over thirty Best Actress winners in that age range. Most have explained this critically as women in Hollywood traditionally being valued for their youth and beauty, especially stars in leading roles, placing some level of urgency among voters to reward an "ingenue" in their prime, while men can be expected to have longer careers and are thus expected to "prove themselves" before winning hardware. However, there is a bit of a cap for older men, as older people in general tend not be cast in as many lead roles; there have been slightly more Best Actress winners over 60 years old than Best Actors.
  • The oldest person ever nominated in an acting category is Christopher Plummer, who got the nod for his last minute reshoot of Kevin Spacey's role in All the Money in the World at 88 years old; Plummer is also the oldest winner in Best Supporting Actor for Beginners, which he won at 82. That was the record for oldest winner in any acting category for several years until Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Father at 83; Hopkins is also the oldest person ever nominated in that category, and due to his age and COVID-19 travel restrictions, he was unable to accept the award in person.
  • The oldest Best Actress winner is 80-year-old Jessica Tandy, who has held the record since winning for Driving Miss Daisy in 1989; the only woman nominated in the category who could have broken that mark was Emmanuelle Riva, nominated for Amour at 85. Peggy Ashcroft is the oldest Supporting Actress winner at 77 for A Passage to India, while the oldest nominee in that category, 87-year-old Gloria Stuart for Titanic, was the oldest nominee of any gender prior to Plummer.
  • The nomination of child actors is often viewed with skepticism, as many voters understandably feel like children should not be honored over other performers who have many more years of work and training or attribute the success of child performers more to the film's director than the actor's talent (not to mention the ethical issues that many have over child labor). To ensure that child actors were recognized without ruffling feathers of adults, there was once an Academy Juvenile Award that was presented here and there throughout the years as a way of recognizing performers under the age of eighteen. The first winner, Shirley Temple, was recognized for her contribution in 1934 as a whole, whereas the final winner, Hayley Mills, was recognized for her performance in Pollyanna. The award was discontinued after 1960, and juvenile performers have since been nominated for the main awards alongside their adult contemporaries. Of the twelve Juvenile Awards given, those awarded to Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien had to be replaced when the originals were lost.
  • Following on from the above, only three children have ever won a competitive Oscar: Patty Duke (16) for The Miracle Worker, Anna Paquin (11) for The Piano, and Tatum O'Neal (10) for Paper Moon, all for Supporting Actress. Tatum O'Neal is also the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar, having held that record since 1973, but she is not the youngest to be nominated. Nine-year-old Jackie Cooper was nominated for Best Actor (yes, as a lead) in 1931 for Skippy. He remains the youngest ever nominated in a lead category, though fellow nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis was nominated for Best Actress in 2012's Beasts of the Southern Wild; the only other child actor nominated in Lead was Keisha Castle-Hughes for Whale Rider.^note Many will point out that this is because child actors are also regularly subject to category fraud and being placed in Supporting rather than Lead on account of their age; Patty Duke and Tatum O'Neal have the most screentime of any Supporting Actress winners by a considerable margin. The youngest nominee in any acting category is Justin Henry for Kramer vs. Kramer, nominated for Supporting Actor in 1979 at just eight. In all, there have been five total children nominated for Supporting Actor and 14 for Supporting Actress.
  • The youngest Best Actress winner is Marlee Matlin (21), who has held the record since 1986 since her debut film performance in Children of a Lesser God; she was also the first deaf performer to win the award (Troy Kotsur, the first male deaf performer and second overall to win an Oscar, did so 25 years later in CODA, where he played Matlin's on-screen husband). The youngest Best Supporting Actor was Timothy Hutton (20) in Ordinary People, holding the record since 1980; the next oldest winner in the category before or since was 29 (unsurprisingly, Hutton formerly held the category record for screentime and was likely bumped down from Lead due to his age).
  • Marlon Brando was the youngest actor to be nominated three times for Best Actor in 1954 at age 30; Timothée Chalamet would later follow suit in 2025, also at age 30. Chalamet also holds the record of the youngest actor to appear in 8 consecutive Best Picture nominees. ^note Call Me by Your Name, Lady Bird, Little Women (2019), Dune (2021), Don't Look Up, Dune: Part Two, A Complete Unknown, Marty Supreme
  • Meryl Streep's seven nominations by age 38 in 1986 was a record until 2025, when Emma Stone received her seventh at 37.
• In 1946, WWII veteran and non-professional actor Harold Russell won two Oscars for the same performance in The Best Years of Our Lives, one for Best Supporting Actor and an honorary Oscar for "bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans" as a double amputee. Russell was the first amateur actor to win an Oscar; the only other one since was Haing S. Ngor for The Killing Fields in 1984.
  • Including these amateurs, sixteen performers have won Oscars for their first ever film performances. In fitting with the aforementioned trends regarding age and gender, only three of those were men and all were in Supporting (the amateurs and youngest ever winner Timothy Hutton). Four of the debut winners won in Lead Actress; besides youngest ever winner Marlee Matlin, the other three were all established Broadway performers who made the jump to screen in the '50s and '60s (Shirley Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl were reprising their Tony-nominated roles, while Julie Andrews win for Mary Poppins was widely attributed to her not getting to do the same in My Fair Lady the same year). Most of the Supporting debut winners were likewise either child stars or former stage or radio actresses, though Jennifer Hudson made the leap from American Idol to Dreamgirls (winning in Supporting despite having the most screentime of any actor in the film). The most recent debut winner was Lupita Nyong'o for 12 Years a Slave in 2013.
• Five Actors have won Oscars in back-to-back years: Luise Rainer (The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth, 1936-37), Spencer Tracy (Captains Courageous and Boys Town, 1937-38), the aforementioned Katherine Hepburn, Jason Robards (the only to do so in Supporting, for All the President's Men and Julia, 1976-77), and most recently Tom Hanks (Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, 1993-94).
• A Streetcar Named Desire, Network, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are the only films to collect three acting awards.
• Fifteen films have received acting nominations in each of the four categories. Only the first, My Man Godfrey, was not also nominated for Best Picture. Godfrey is also one of only three of those films (along with Sunset Boulevard and American Hustle) to not pick up a single acting win (Godfrey and Hustle didn't win any awards). David O. Russell is the only person to have directed two of those films, doing so in back-to-back years in 2012-13 with Silver Linings Playbook and Hustle; those are also the only two acting nomination sweeps to occur since 1981's Reds!.
  • Nine films have received five total acting nominations, getting two noms in at least one category, though this hasn't happened since Network in 1976. All About Eve is the only one of these that didn't get a nominee in all four categories; it lacked a contender for Best Actor and is thus the only film to earn nominations for four different actresses and to produce two separate intra-film competitions (Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in Lead and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter in Supporting). All four women lost, their competition splitting the vote, while sole male candidate George Sanders ironically walked away with a trophy in Supporting.
• As mentioned, the Supporting categories were created to prevent more than two actors from the same movie from competing against each other after that happened with Mutiny on the Bounty. This was successful in the Lead categories, but there have been a few other instances of one film getting three noms in one Supporting category: On the Waterfront and both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II in Actor and Tom Jones in Actress. This hasn't happened since 1974, when Robert De Niro became the only actor in such a circumstance to overcome vote-splitting and win for The Godfather Part II.
  • With the rise of more sophisticated campaign strategies/category fraud, it's been less and less common in recent years for one film to get multiple nominations in Lead, as co-leads will typically run in Supporting and leverage their greater screentime for a win. The last time one film had two nominees in Lead Actor was with Amadeus in 1984 (where F. Murray Abraham overcame vote splits to win) while the last time it happened in Actress was in 1991 for Thelma & Louise.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sleuth (1972), and Give Em Hell Harry are the only films to have their entire cast nominated. Who's Afraid had a cast of four, with nominees in all four categories and wins for both actresses; Sleuth was a two-hander at Actor, while Give 'em Hell, Harry! was a filmed one-man show.
• The Miracle Worker and Hud are the only films to win two acting Oscars without a nomination for Best Picture; they did so in back-to-back years (1962-63).
• As of 2025, 40 Best Picture winners (a little less than half) didn't win any acting Oscars, and only 12 didn't receive any nominations. When accounting for Early-Installment Weirdness (namely, the rarity of multi-nominees through most of the ceremony's first 20 years and the Best Picture success of non-dramatic films in the 1950s), total acting nomination shutouts for Best Picture winners are very rare, with only five since 1960. Those can be sorted into two categories: action-oriented medieval epics (Braveheart, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) and films with mainly non-White casts (The Last Emperor, Slumdog Millionaire, Parasite).
• Acting is often a family business, and there are plenty of Hollywood families with multiple Oscar nominees and winners (several in different fields). Sometimes the Oscars help bring families together; Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda were famously both nominated for their portrayal of a father-daughter pair in On Golden Pond (with Jane accepting the award on her elderly father's behalf just a few months before his passing), while Diane Ladd and Laura Dern would later be nominated as a mother-daughter pair for their performances in Rambling Rose. However, while those parent-child couplings had both actors running in separate categories, there have been two occasions where family pairs—both siblings—have run against each other. The most famous and contentious was Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine competing against each other in Best Actress in 1942—Fontaine's win for Suspicion played a major role in their ongoing feud—while Vanessa Redgrave and Lynn Redgrave both ran in Actress in 1966, losing to Elizabeth Taylor. Olivia and Joan are also the only siblings to both win Lead acting Oscars.