Walt Disney has won the most Oscars of all time
The Oscars take place on February 26th this year
The award for Best Actress has actually been shared once. The votes were tied between two winners, so instead of choosing one, the actresses had to share the award. They were Barbra Streisand for her performance in Funny Girl and Katherine Hepburn for her performance in The Lion in Winter in 1969.
In 1934 Best Actor was also tied going to Wallace Beery for The Champ and to Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Prior to the first Academy Awards in 1929 the winners were told two months before the ceremony about their triumphs. In order to keep some suspense, the next year the winners were not told, but the list was given to newspapers in advance so that they could print the winners as soon as the ceremony was over. This continued until 1940 when the LA newspaper The Los Angeles Times printed the winners in the evening addition of the paper revealing who they were before the nominees went into the ceremony. After this the awards took on the sealed envelope approach that we see today.
This year nominees for the Oscars will be officially announced on January 24th. Then, nearly 6000 people vote on the awards, voters are members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is an ivite-only membership made up mostly of esteemed actors. The ceremony itself takes place on February 26th.
Walt Disney has won the most Oscars of all time, being nominated for 64 and winning an incredible 26, which include three special awards and an honorary one too.
Katherine Hepburn has won the most Oscars as a solo artist, she won four for Best Actress.
For the film Paper Moon, a 10 year old Tatum O'Neal became the youngest ever Oscar winner in 1974.
Three films have managaed to rake in the top five awards of the ceremony, Best Film, Actor, Actress, Director and Writing. These were It Happened One Night (1934), One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1976), and Silence of the Lambs (1992).
During World War II the Oscar statues were made of plaster instead of real gold.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is the only film to have won every Academy Award it was nominated for.
Ben Hur (1960 Awards), the Titanic (1998 Awards), and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2004 Awards) all won 11 Oscars, the most any film has ever won.
The Oscars were first broadcast on TV in 1953.