57 Fun Facts About Oscars 2024

Which venue, the Oscars' regular home since 2002, hosted the 2024 ceremony?

Dolby Theatre was the Kodak Theatre until 2012: Kodak went bankrupt halfway through a 20-year naming deal, and Dolby put its name on the Oscars' home instead.

Which film won Best Picture at the 2024 Oscars?

Oppenheimer won Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards; the atomic-bomb biopic grossed more than $900 million worldwide, the highest-grossing winner of the award since 2003.

Which studio released the 2024 Best Picture winner after its director split from Warner Bros.?

Universal landed the film after its director, long a Warner Bros. fixture, blasted that studio for putting its 2021 releases on streaming the same day as cinemas.

Which composer extended his record as the oldest Oscar nominee with a 54th nomination in 2024?

John Williams, 91, was nominated for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, leaving only Walt Disney with more nominations; he lost the award to a composer 52 years his junior.

Which comedian hosted the 2024 Oscars for the fourth time?

Jimmy Kimmel greeted the booking with a joke, 'I always dreamed of hosting the Oscars exactly four times', a tally still far behind Bob Hope's 19.

Who won Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars for playing the physicist behind the atomic bomb?

Cillian Murphy, winning on his first nomination, dedicated the Oscar to 'the peacemakers everywhere', saying we all now live in the world his character made.

Who won Best Actress at the 2024 Oscars for playing the reanimated Bella Baxter in Poor Things?

Emma Stone's second Best Actress Oscar was no formality: the race had looked too close to call until the envelope opened.

Which 2016 musical earned the 2024 Best Actress winner her first Oscar?

La La Land won her Best Actress in 2017, minutes before it was wrongly announced as Best Picture; the mix-up was corrected on stage and Moonlight took the prize.

Who won Best Supporting Actor at the 2024 Oscars for playing Lewis Strauss?

Robert Downey Jr. began his speech by thanking 'my terrible childhood and the Academy, in that order', adding that he needed the job more than it needed him.

The 2024 Best Supporting Actor winner was earlier nominated for Chaplin and which 2008 comedy?

Tropic Thunder cast him as Kirk Lazarus, a method actor who has his skin surgically darkened to play a Black soldier; the satire earned a nomination, but he lost to the late Heath Ledger.

Who won Best Supporting Actress at the 2024 Oscars for playing grieving school cook Mary Lamb?

Da'Vine Joy Randolph, in tears, told the audience: 'For so long I've always wanted to be different, and now I realise I just need to be myself.'

Which Best Picture nominee is set at a New England boarding school in 1970?

The Holdovers began when Alexander Payne watched Merlusse, a 1935 French film about boarding-school boys stuck over the holidays with a despised teacher, and had a new story built on it.

The 2024 Best Picture winner was the first to also win both male acting awards since which 1959 film?

Ben-Hur's Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith both won in an 11-Oscar sweep; MGM, in financial trouble, had gambled on the costly epic to turn the studio around.

Who won Best Director at the 2024 Oscars, taking home his first Academy Award?

Christopher Nolan had lost on all five of his earlier nominations, including screenplay nods for Memento and Inception, before winning for both directing and Best Picture in one night.

At 81, who became the oldest Best Director nominee in Oscar history in 2024?

Martin Scorsese took the record from John Huston, nominated at 79 for Prizzi's Honor; it was his tenth directing nomination, and only The Departed had brought him a win.

Which actress became the first US-born Native American nominated for Best Actress, in 2024?

Lily Gladstone, raised on the Blackfeet reservation, had already made history at the Golden Globes, where she began her acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language.

Which film brought De Niro's first nomination, 49 years before 2024's?

The Godfather Part II won him the Oscar at the first attempt, for a young Vito Corleone who speaks almost no English; the 49-year span beat Katharine Hepburn's 48, the longest for any actor.

Which song won Best Original Song at the 2024 Oscars?

'What Was I Made For?', Billie Eilish's ballad for the Greta Gerwig film, beat that film's own 'I'm Just Ken', which Ryan Gosling performed live on the night.

The 2024 Best Original Song winner first won that award for which Bond film's theme?

No Time to Die won at the 2022 ceremony; its singer and her brother wrote and recorded the Bond theme in three days on a tour bus in Texas.

Ryan Gosling's 2024 performance of 'I'm Just Ken' paid homage to a number from which classic film?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes gave Marilyn Monroe 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend'; the Oscars number restaged it with a sparkling pink suit and dozens of dancing Kens.

Which rock guitarist joined Ryan Gosling's 'I'm Just Ken' at the 2024 Oscars?

Slash had already played on the film's studio recording after producer Mark Ronson sent him the track; at the Oscars he turned up to play the closing solo.

Which film became the first British winner of Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars?

The Zone of Interest keeps the killing off screen: it is only heard from the family garden beside the camp wall, and that soundscape won the film a second Oscar, for Best Sound.

The 2024 Best International Feature winner follows the family of which real Auschwitz commandant?

Rudolf Höss lived with his wife and children in a villa against the camp wall, as the film shows; in April 1947 he was hanged at Auschwitz itself.

The director of the 2024 Best Animated Feature winner first won that award 21 years earlier for which film?

Spirited Away won at the 2003 ceremony, but its director stayed home: he later said he had not wanted to visit a country that was bombing Iraq.

Which film won Best Visual Effects at the 2024 Oscars with an effects team of only 35 artists?

Godzilla Minus One beat far costlier Hollywood blockbusters to give the 70-year-old franchise its first Oscar; director Takashi Yamazaki also supervised the effects himself.

Which film won Best Animated Feature at the 2024 Oscars?

The Boy and the Heron exists because Hayao Miyazaki went back on his 2013 retirement; at 83 he won the award he had first taken two decades earlier.

Which Palme d'Or winner took Best Original Screenplay at the 2024 Oscars?

Anatomy of a Fall won even though France's Oscar committee had passed it over as the country's International Feature entry, choosing The Taste of Things, which then missed the nominations.

Which film, drawn from Percival Everett's novel Erasure, won Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024?

American Fiction follows a novelist whose joke manuscript, a parody of stereotyped 'Black' books, is mistaken for serious literature and becomes a hit; it was Cord Jefferson's first film.

Which film won Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 Oscars, its country's first Academy Award?

20 Days in Mariupol's director said on stage that he would trade the Oscar for Russia never having attacked Ukraine or occupied its cities.

Which news organisation's journalists filmed the 2024 Best Documentary Feature winner?

Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko were the only international reporters left in the besieged city, and their footage gave the world its defining images of the siege.

Which director won Best Live Action Short in 2024 for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar?

Wes Anderson had been nominated for films from The Royal Tenenbaums to The Grand Budapest Hotel without winning; this Roald Dahl adaptation finally brought his first Oscar.

The 2024 Best Animated Short winner, 'War Is Over!', was inspired by the music of which couple?

John and Yoko's 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)' inspired the short, made with their son Sean Ono Lennon, in which two enemy soldiers play chess across no man's land by carrier pigeon.

The Last Repair Shop, the 2024 Best Documentary Short winner, visits craftspeople who fix what for Los Angeles schoolchildren?

Musical instruments are repaired free of charge for Los Angeles public school pupils; after the film, its makers helped launch a drive to raise $15 million for the workshop.

Which composer won Best Original Score in 2024 for the atomic-bomb biopic?

Ludwig Göransson built the score around a solo violin at the director's suggestion, because the instrument can turn from romantic to horrifying in a split second.

The 2024 Best Actor winner was that award's first born in which country?

Ireland-born actors had never won Best Actor until this Cork native, who told the audience he was 'a very proud Irishman'.

Which 2024 Best Picture nominee was the highest-grossing film of 2023?

Barbie was the year's biggest box-office hit, yet Greta Gerwig's blockbuster turned eight nominations into a single Oscar, for Original Song.

Angela Bassett's 2024 Honorary Oscar made her the second Black actress so honoured, after which star in 2018?

Cicely Tyson, honoured at 93, had waited 45 years since her only nomination, for Sounder; she was Bassett's mentor and played her mother in The Rosa Parks Story.

Who presented Best Picture alone at the 2024 Oscars, skipping the nominees and blurting the winner?

Al Pacino said the next day that he had meant no slight: the producers had chosen not to have the ten nominees read out again, since each had been highlighted during the show.

Which star presented Best Costume Design at the 2024 Oscars, appearing to be naked behind the envelope?

John Cena edged out apparently naked behind the envelope, a 'streaker' bit staged 50 years after a real one ran across the Oscars stage in 1974; Poor Things' Holly Waddington won the award.

Presenting Best Sound at the 2024 Oscars, which comedian reeled off a breathless plot summary of Field of Dreams?

John Mulaney was no stranger to the Academy: two months earlier it had sprung him, unannounced, as host of its Governors Awards.

In the format the 2024 Oscars revived from 2009, who introduced each acting nominee on stage?

A past winner of that award saluted each nominee in person, so twenty Oscar-winning actors shared the stage across the four categories, among them Nicolas Cage and Lupita Nyong'o.

Which singer performed with his son during the In Memoriam segment of the 2024 Oscars?

Andrea Bocelli and his son Matteo sang 'Time to Say Goodbye'; the segment opened with a clip of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who had died in prison the month before.

Which two actors presented the tribute to stunt performers at the 2024 Oscars?

Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling were about to release The Fall Guy, their comedy about a stuntman, which is why one critic called the tribute a stealth commercial.

Which footballer shares his name with the canine star seated at the 2024 Oscars?

Lionel Messi's namesake is a border collie who played the family dog in one of the year's nominated films; he had his own seat, and the host joked about him in the monologue.

Which of these received an Honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards ahead of the 2024 ceremony?

Mel Brooks, 97, joked that he missed the Oscar he won for writing The Producers and never should have sold it, then swore he would not sell this one.

For which 2022 film had Angela Bassett lost Best Supporting Actress before her 2024 Honorary Oscar?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever brought her a nomination as Queen Ramonda but no win; accepting the honorary Oscar a year later, she told the room it was 'not just another award'.

Which Spanish-language Netflix film was a 2024 nominee for Best International Feature?

Society of the Snow, J. A. Bayona's retelling of the 1972 Andes plane crash, was nominated for International Feature and for Makeup and Hairstyling, and lost both.

Which acting nominee in 2024 was recognised for playing composer Leonard Bernstein?

Bradley Cooper also directed, co-wrote and produced Maestro, collecting three nominations himself, yet he and the film left without a single award.

Which 2024 Best Actor nominee played civil rights organiser Bayard Rustin?

Colman Domingo played the man who planned the 1963 March on Washington yet was kept behind the scenes because he was openly gay; the Obamas' company produced the film.

Which 2024 Best Actress nominee played long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad?

Annette Bening played the marathon swimmer who set out in her sixties to swim from Cuba to Florida, braving jellyfish stings on the way; Jodie Foster was nominated too, as her coach Bonnie Stoll.

Which duo from Greta Gerwig's 2023 blockbuster earned supporting-acting nominations?

Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera were the film's only acting nominees: Margot Robbie missed out as Best Actress and Greta Gerwig as director, though both were nominated in other categories.

Which film went into the 2024 Oscars with ten nominations and left without a single award?

Killers of the Flower Moon took a ribbing before any award was handed out, when the host's monologue mocked its length; by the end of the night it had lost in all ten categories.

Singers and dancers from which Native American nation performed a Best Original Song nominee at the 2024 Oscars?

Osage singers and drummers performed 'Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)', written because the director wanted his film about the 1920s Osage murders to end with music created by the Osage themselves.

Which 2024 Oscar winner's Gaza speech was misquoted, prompting duelling open letters?

Jonathan Glazer said he stood 'as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation'; more than 1,000 Jewish industry members signed a letter denouncing the speech, and others signed one supporting it.

Whose online jab at his hosting did the 2024 Oscars host read out live on stage?

Donald Trump had posted, 'Has there ever been a worse host?'; the host read it to the room, thanked him for watching and asked, 'Isn't it past your jail time?'

Which ABC sitcom aired a new episode as the lead-out after the earlier-starting 2024 Oscars?

Abbott Elementary aired a new episode straight after the ceremony, which ABC had moved up an hour to 4 p.m. Pacific so it would finish earlier for East Coast viewers.

Which online interviewer served as the 2024 Oscars' social media and red carpet correspondent?

Amelia Dimoldenberg, whose Chicken Shop Date series sets up deadpan 'dates' with celebrities in fried-chicken shops, was brought back by the Academy for the next two ceremonies.