2017 Oscars: Stats, Facts and Trivia and the Million Dollar Baby Connection

Erik Anderson February 27, 2017

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Despite the truly bizarre ending of the wrong film initially being announced as Best Picture, last night’s Oscars was filled with lots of streaks that held true, some that broke and history made.

Here are some of the statistics, facts, and trivia about the winners and losers of the 89th Academy Awards.

Broken Streaks, Broken Records and Firsts

La La Land became the first movie with 14 nominations to not win Best Picture.

If you count Jordan Horowitz, this was only the second time in Oscar history that Best Picture had 3 presenters.

This was the longest Oscar ceremony of the last 10 years (3 hours, 49 minutes).

O.J.: Made in America is now the longest film to win an Oscar (7 hours, 47 minutes).

Moonlight is the first fully LGBT story to win Best Picture.

Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) is the first Muslim person to win an acting Oscar.

At 32, La La Land‘s Damien Chazelle broke an 85-year record to become the youngest Best Director winner ever. It was previously held by Norman Taurog for 1931’s Skippy. Interestingly enough, that film also lost Best Picture.

This was the fourth Best Picture/Best Director split in five years.

For the second year in a row, two women won the Oscar for Best Picture as producers. Adele Romanski and Dede Gardner won for Moonlight. Nicole Rocklin and Blye Pagon Faust won the year before for Spotlight.

Since 2013, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B have received back-to-back Oscar nominations four years in a row for 12 Years a Slave, Selma, The Big Short, and Moonlight. They’ve now won 2 Best Picture films in a span of four years.

Dede Gardner (Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave) is the first woman to win Best Picture twice.

This is the first time both supporting winners have been black.

Moonlight is the first movie to win BP without PGA, SAG, or DGA since 1995’s Braveheart.

Kevin O’Connell (Sound Mixing, Hacksaw Ridge) finally won his first Oscar after 21 nominations.

Hacksaw Ridge is only the second movie to win Sound Mixing and lose Sound Editing when nominated for both since the category was re-introduced in the 80’s. It previously happened when Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight split in 2009.

This was the first time since 1998 that all four acting winners played fictional characters.

First time in 19 years that all acting winners were American.

Viola Davis becomes the 9th person to win an Oscar and Tony for the same role (Fences). She also completes the O for her EGOT, now just missing the G (Grammy).

Linus Sandgren (La La Land) is only the second Swedish cinematographer to win an Oscar after Sven Nykvist for 1973’s Cries and Whispers.

Iran joins to Argentina, Austria with two Oscars for Foreign Language Film and Asghar Farhadi joins Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Clément, and De Sica as a multiple-winning director.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first film from the Harry Potter franchise to win an Oscar (Costume Design).

Suicide Squad is the first film from the DC universe to win an Oscar (Makeup and Hairstyling).

First time a living person’s photo was in the In Memoriam segment; Jan Chapman’s photo was used to represent costume designer Janet Patterson.

If “City of Stars” does not chart on next week’s Billboard Hot 100, it will be the first Original Song winner not to do so since “Man or Muppet” in 2011.

The White Helmets (Netflix) and Manchester by the Sea (Amazon) become the first Oscar wins for a streaming studio.

Screen Actors Guild

SAG stat stands – no BP winner has won without a SAG cast nomination/win since Braveheart (first year of cast award).

Hidden Figures is the only the third SAG ensemble winner in 23 years to go home empty-handed at the Oscars. Previously it was 1996’s The Birdcage and 2013’s American Hustle.

First time in 12 years running that the SAG Best Actor doesn’t repeat at the Oscars. The last was Johnny Depp for 2003’s The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe became the first actors to star in the film that won Best Picture (Moonlight) while also winning SAG Ensemble for a different film (Hidden Figures).

The Million Dollar Baby-December Connection

La La Land‘s Best Picture loss keeps the ‘no December film has won BP since Million Dollar Baby‘ intact.

Million Dollar Baby (2004) is still the last Best Picture winner to feature an actress nominated in a lead role.

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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.