2016 Oscars: Trivia, History and Fun Facts

Erik Anderson February 29, 2016

**From left; Alejandro G. Iñárritu (The Revenant), Ex Machina, Spotlight**

We all knew that this year was going to produce a flurry of new records and stats and last night’s Oscar certainly didn’t disappoint.

Here are some trivia highlights from the 88th Academy Awards. Keep checking back for updated facts and stats.

Best Picture winner Spotlight becomes the 6th film to win BP and only one other award and the first to do so since 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which also just won Screenplay. The others are: Wings (also won for Special Effects). All Quiet on the Western Front (also won for Directing), You Can’t Take It With You (also won for Directing), Rebecca (also won for Cinematography).

Spotlight breaks and makes records this year by being the first and only film to win Best Picture with only a SAG ensemble win under its belt. It breaks the streak of the PGA winner also winning the Best Picture Oscar since the expanded field began and the first overall since 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine.

Adversely, The Big Short becomes the first PGA winner to lose Best Picture since 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine.

This is the first Best Picture win for Open Road Films and Participant Media. Spotlight is the first film with two female producers to win Best Picture (Nicole Rocklin and Blye Pagon Faust).

This marks the 4th year in a row the Best Picture winner went home with four or fewer Oscars. The last big “sweep” was 2009’s The Hurt Locker (6 wins/9 nominations) and 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire (8 wins/10 nominations).

Alejandro G. Iñárritu (The Revenant) wins Best Director for the second year in a row (after last year’s Birdman) and becomes only the third director ever to achieve that and the first in 65 years. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950-1951) and John Ford (1941-1942) are the others.

The Revenant‘s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, won his 3rd Oscar in a row, creating a new record. He won last year for Birdman and for Gravity the year before that.

Ex Machina broke a 45-year streak by being the first non-Best Picture nominee to win Visual Effects against one or more Best Picture nominees since Tora! Tora! Tora! beat Patton in 1971. This is exceptional also for the fact that it was the lowest box office film of the year (and the lowest winner since 1982’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial) and it beat out the highest grossing film of all time (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

Speaking of Star Wars, this marks the first year that the current highest grossing film of all time went home empty-handed on Oscar night. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was nominated for 5 Oscars and lost four of them to Mad Max: Fury Road and one to Ex Machina.

Continuing with box office stats, this is the 2nd year in a row the Best Picture winner won with less than $40M at the box office at the time of the ceremony and the third year in a row with sub-100M winners. The last time we had a streak that long? 1980-1982.

The biggest winner of the night, Mad Max: Fury Road (which won 6 Oscars), joins the original Star Wars as the film(s) to receive the most Oscars without a Best Director or Best Picture win.

Mark Rylance’s win for Bridge of Spies gives director Steven Spielberg his first acting win in Supporting Actor. Amazingly, this is also only the second performance to win for a Spielberg film. The first was Daniel Day-Lewis’s Best Actor win for Lincoln just three years ago. However, it is the 32nd overall win for a Spielberg film.

At 87, Ennio Morricone (Original Score, The Hateful Eight) becomes the oldest Oscar winner in any competitive category.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.