Oscars 2017 Trivia: 53 fun facts about the 89th Academy Awards!

Let’s see some amazing facts about the 89th Academy Awards and its nominees that will blow your mind!

1. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, will be produced by Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd and directed by Glenn Weiss.

2. This is the first year that afroamerican actors have been nominated in every major category.

3.It’s Viola Davis’s third nomination — a record for a black actress.

4. This is the 16th year the Oscars will be held in the Dolby Theater.

5. 3,300 people will attend.

6. La La Land received 14 nominations, tying a record first set by All About Eve and later tied by Titanic.

7. Seven actors are celebrating their first nominations this year: Lion‘s Dev Patel, Loving‘s Ruth Negga, Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali, Manchester by the Sea‘s Lucas Hedges, Hacksaw Ridge‘s Andrew Garfield and Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert.

8. Meryl Streep’s 20th nomination.

9.So far Meryl Streep has won three oscars, for The Iron Lady, Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice.

10.It is Jimmy Kimmel’s first time hosting the Oscars.

11. There are nine Best Picture nominees — one more than the past two years.

12.The Oscars 2017 will be aired in 225 countries and territories across the globe.

13. The ceremony is estimated to cost $42.8 million to put on.

14. La La Land is the top-grossing Best Picture nominee, with over $340 million worldwide. Hidden Figures, however, has a higher domestic gross, at over $145 million to La La Land‘s $135 million.

15. 683 new members joined the Academy this year.

16. The red carpet at the Dolby Theater will be approximately 33 feet wide and 900 feet long.

17. Sound mixer Kevin O’Connell (Hacksaw Ridge) holds the records for most nominations without a win — 21.

18. According to composer Justin Hurwitz, all the piano performance featured in the film was first recorded by pianist Randy Kerber during pre-production. Ryan Gosling then spent two hours a day, six days a week in piano lessons learning the music by heart. By the time filming had begun, Gosling was able to play all the piano sequences seen in the film without the use of a hand double or CGI.

19. Emma Watson turned down the role of Mia due to scheduling conflicts with Beaty and the Beast (2017), while Ryan Gosling turned down the role of the Beast in that film to appear in this one. Coincidentally, both are musicals.

20. The audition scene, where the casting director interrupts Mia’s emotional performance to take a phone call, was actually inspired by one of Ryan Gosling’s auditions in real life.

21. Because the director wanted to shoot the scene in the tradition of old musicals without cuts or editing, Ryan Gosling practiced playing the piano and played it himself in one take on his first day of shooting. Co-star John Legend, who is a classically trained pianist, says he is “jealous” of how quickly Gosling learned to play so well.

22. La La Land (2016) has strong ties to Emma Stone’s real-life history. The movie is based in LA, and Mia is discovered as a college dropout actress pursuing her dreams. Emma Stone is actually a school dropout herself, moving to LA at the age of 15 in pursuit of an acting career.

23. Mia’s canary-yellow color dress was originally used as stand-by for dance rehearsals, but Emma Stone like it so much that she was permitted to wear it on film.

See more La La Land Trivia here!

24. Originally, the film was going to be directed by Matt Damon, but due to scheduling complications, Lonergan was set to direct instead, while Damon would stay involved as producer and lead actor.

25. The town was called Manchester until 1989, when resident Edward Corley led a highly controversial campaign to formally change its name to Manchester-by-the-Sea. The action was passed by the state legislature that year.

26. According to an interview with Kenneth Lonergan on DP/30, the idea for the film didn’t originate with him – the main core of a character going back home to take care of a family member after a death was pitched to Lonergan by Matt Damon and John Krasinski as a script that Lonergan would write and for Damon to direct. But due to scheduling conflicts with The Rescue (2015), Damon couldn’t direct the film or star in it (he was considered for the role of Lee that Casey Affleck was cast in.) Lonergan was then given free rein as a writer-director for the project, with Damon as producer.

27. The boat owned by Joe Chandler (and inherited by Patrick) is called Claudia Marie. This is the name of Joe’s mother (aka Patrick’s grandmother). This can be seen when the family’s grave is shown during Joe’s burial.

Read more Manchester by the sea trivia here!

28. When Juan teaches Little how to swim, Mahershala Ali is really teaching Alex R. Hibbert how to swim. When production started, Hibbert did not know how to swim.

29. Naomie Harris had to shoot her entire role in three days, in between her promotional tour of Spectre (2015), due to a visa problem (Harris is British). The scenes spanned 15 years in the character’s life and were filmed out of sequence.

30. Both director Barry Jenkins and writer Tarell Alvin McCraney’s vision was pretty clear and singular in that both men grew up in the same Liberty City neighborhood of Miami with mothers who had both struggled with drug addiction. Roughly 80% of the film was shot on location here, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States. Initially the production was apprehensive about safety issues until the word got out that Jenkins was from the neighborhood – then everything changed for the better. The locals couldn’t have been more welcoming and cooperative. Naomie Harris has said that she’d never felt so appreciated and at ease on a film set during the shoot.

31. The second song that plays in the Diner is “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis. Director Barry Jenkins made the decision to actually play the song on the jukebox in the background while they were filming.

32. Director Barry Jenkins’ favorite scene in his film was an impromptu sequence of Paula (Naomie Harris) staring straight into the camera overcranked at 48fps. This was a last-minute decision by Jenkins specifically intended to fully engage the audience with Paula’s character.

See more Moonlight trivia here!

33. As for Hidden Figures the actual working relationship between the engineers and women was not as hostile as it appears in the film. While there were clearly racial issues at play, the majority of the engineers were able to work with the computers with no issues.

34. The issue with the bathrooms was not something Katherine Johnson experienced, but rather lived by Mary Jackson. In fact, it was this incident that resulted in Jackson ranting to a colleague which got her placed on the wind tunnel team. Katherine Johnson simply refused to use colored restrooms.

35. When Taraji P. Henson signed on for the lead role, she met with the real-life Katherine Johnson, who was 98 years old, to discuss the character she was about to portray. Henson learned that Johnson had graduated from high school at age 14 and from college at age 18, and was still as lucid as anyone years younger. After the film was screened for Johnson, she expressed her genuine approval of Henson’s portrayal, but wondered why anybody would want to make a film about her life.

36. One of the ways that Katherine experiences workplace discrimination is when her coworkers require her to use a separate coffee pot. Whenever the office’s coffee area is shown, the brand of coffee that they use, Chock Full o’Nuts, is also visible. The use of this brand in the context of segregation is historically relevant. In 1957, Chock Full o’Nuts was one of the first major New York corporations to hire a black executive as a corporate vice-president. The man they hired, retired baseball legend Jackie Robinson, made history by being the first person to break the color barrier in professional baseball

Read more Hidden Figures trivia here!

37. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer created a fully functioning, visual, alien language. Heisserer, Vermette and their teams managed to create a “logogram bible,” which included over a hundred different completely operative logo-grams, seventy-one of which are actually featured in the movie.

38. While the shape of the ship was decided early on, Denis Villeneuve had great difficulty imagining an interior that would allow humans to easily navigate through such a steep and vertical design. The later decision to turn gravity sideways offered an obvious and convenient solution.

39. The inky circular alien language was created by Montreal artist Martine Bertrand. It is also the artist’s son who created Hannah’s drawings.

40. Director Denis Villeneuve and the writing team took extensive efforts to ensure the movie’s scientific ideology was accurate. Renowned scientist and tech innovator Stephen Wolfram and his son Christopher Wolfram were consulted to ensure all terminology, graphics and depictions were sound.

41. The Hungarian word that Halpern refers to is “szalámitaktika.” (In English, this translates to “salami tactics.”) The word refers to divide the opposition, to only have to face smaller, weaker enemies.

Read more Arrival Trivia here!

42. “Fences” opened on Broadway in 1987, winning the Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Actor (James Earl Jones), and Best Featured Actress (Mary Alice). A revival of “Fences” opened in 2010, winning the Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play, Best Actor Denzel Washington, and Best Actress (Viola Davis). All five adult actors reprise their roles in this film adaptation, with Washington also directing.

43. Fences was originally a 1983 play by August Wilson. Set in the 1950s, it is the sixth in Wilson’s ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle”. Like all of the “Pittsburgh” plays, Fences explores the evolving African-American experience, and examines race relations, among other themes. The play won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play.

44. Viola Davis’s performance is campaigned as supporting during awards season. This placement was seen as category fraud by some awards pundits. In an interview with Deadline, Denzel Washington said he disagreed with the placement, but that is was Davis’ own decision, which would improve her chances of winning.

45. Denzel has said that after having performed the play 114 times at the Cort Theatre in New York City in 2010, directing the film adaptation became quite a simple readjustment.

46. When Paramount Studios originally acquired the film rights to the play in 1987 with the involvement of Eddie Murphy, it was largely due to Murphy wanting to take on a more “serious” film role: that of the seventeen year-old son Cory. However, in 1987, Murphy was already a full decade older than the character of Cory, and the many filming delays meant that Murphy quickly aged out of eligibility for the role.

47. In Lila & Eve (2015), a recurring line is that Viola Davis’s character has ‘a date with Denzel’ meaning she’s staying home watching movies starring Denzel Washington. One year later she actually plays his wife in this film

48. In the film’s opening shot, the most prominent building on the left side of the street is lettered PITTSBURGH COURIER. The Courier was Pittsburgh’s African-American newspaper, among the country’s most respected. One of its sportswriters, Wendell Smith, advocated for ending the color line in major league baseball and traveled in 1947 with Jackie Robinson through his inaugural season with the Brooklyn Dodger

Read more Fences trivia here!

49. The phrase “come hell or high water” typically means “do whatever needs to be done, no matter the circumstances”. It also refers to the “hell or high water clause” in a contract, usually a lease, which states that the payments must continue regardless of any difficulties the paying party may encounter. Both definitions apply to different parts of the plot in this movie.

50. The film is dedicated to David John Mackenzie (1929-2015) and Ursula Sybil Mackenzie (1940-2015), the parents of director David Mackenzie. Both died while he was making this film.

51. Toby offers his son a beer. Texas is one of ten states that allows underage minors to consume alcohol in specific locations, such as the privacy of home or in the presence of consenting and supervising family members.

52. This movie is set in Texas, but not a single scene was actually filmed there.

53. Comancheria, the film’s original title, is the region of New Mexico, West Texas, and nearby areas occupied by the Comanche before the 1860s.
Read more Hell or High Water trivia here!