91st Oscars: The Stats, Trivia and History

It was a banner year for breaking records, setting new ones and trivia that we’ll put to use in coming years.

We saw the strength of the Telluride Film Festival fall (one of the last solid stats we had), the SAG Cast nomination not matter for a second year in a row and the rise of Venice and Toronto.

Here are some of the firsts, records, stats, trivia and more from the 91st Academy Awards.

Oscar winner Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich, 2000) became the first woman to present Best Picture solo since Barbra Streisand in 1991.

As of last night, Glenn Close (The Wife) has the most acting nominations for a living actor without a win, at 7. Amy Adams (Vice) is right behind her with 6. Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born) also is 0/7 – 4 for acting, 1 for writing and 2 for producing Best Picture nominees.

Best Picture winner Green Book didn’t just win three Oscars, it landed a few choice statistical moments. It’s the first Best Picture winner to not screen at the Telluride Film Festival, since The Hurt Locker (2009). It’s the 8th Grolsch’s Toronto People’s Choice award winner to win Best Picture, a list that includes Crash and American Beauty. It’s also the highest-grossing Best Picture winner at the domestic box office since Argo, six years ago. It also has the lowest Metacritic score for a BP winner since 2005’s Crash (both 69). It is only the 5th film in Oscar history to win Best Picture without a Best Director nomination.

Alfonso Cuarón set two firsts, and a third if you will. He became the first Best Director winner of a foreign language film (Roma) and the first director to also win Best Cinematography for shooting his own film. With Roma, Mexico earned its first FLF win after 52 submissions and 9 nominations.

This is the 11th year in a row where there was winner overlap between Director and Cinematography (Roma this year) and/or Cinematography and Visual Effects.

Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse‘s win for Sony marks the first time Disney/Pixar lost when they have a movie nominated since Cars lost to Happy Feet. It’s also the first Animated Feature winner with a black lead.

With wins in Costume Design, Production Design and Original Score, Black Panther is the first Marvel film to win an Oscar.

All four acting winners are either currently on a television series or in production on an upcoming season: Malek (USA’s Mr. Robot), Colman (upcoming third season of Netflix’s The Crown), Ali (current season of HBO’s True Detective), King (upcoming Watchmen series on HBO).

Three of the four acting winners: Rami Malek (Best Actor), Mahershala Ali (Supporting Actor) and Regina King (Supporting Actress) are of Arab descent or African-American. That is the most non-white acting winners in Oscar history.

This is the third consecutive year the Best Supporting Actress winner was previously an Emmy winner (Regina King, Allison Janney, Viola Davis).

King joins Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock) and Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) as the only actors to win without being nominated at SAG first.

Mahershala Ali (Green Book) is the first double Supporting Actor winner to earn his both of his wins from Best Picture winners (the first was for Moonlight two years ago). He is also the first black performer to win two Oscars in supporting.

National Board of Review: Green Book is the first NBR Best Picture winner there to win the BP Oscar since Slumdog Millionaire. Regina King is the first NBR supporting actress winner to hit Oscar gold since Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

Bohemian Rhapsody: The film had the 7th most nominations of the Best Picture contenders yet managed the most wins of the night, with four. There are only two precedents for a movie with 7th or lower number of nominations getting the most wins.

• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, 7th in nominations 4 noms, won 3 Oscars: Editing, Production Design, Score, only lost BP) – BP winner, You Can’t Take It with You won 2 Oscars, BP and BD.
  

• The Thief of Bagdad (1940, 11th in nominations with 4, won 3 Oscars: Cinematography, Production Design, VFX, only lost Score) – BP winner, Rebecca won 2 Oscars, BP and Cinematography.

Bohemian Rhapsody won four of its five Oscar nominations, losing only Best Picture. The last film to do that was 2000’s Traffic. It is the first music-based film to win the Sound Editing Oscar, in the process making Nina Hartstone only the second woman ever to win the award.

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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.

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