Oscar trivia: Take our quiz!
Take our quiz, and test your knowledge gleaned from repeatedly staying up late (regardless of school nights, work or hangovers) to indulge in movie lovers' greatest guilty pleasure: watching the annual Academy Awards.Click on the arrow button at upper right to advance through the quiz.
Q. 1. What was the first film to win Best Animated Feature?
1. "Beauty and the Beast"
2. "Monsters, Inc."
3. "Toy Story 2"
4. "Prince of Egypt"
5. "Shrek"
"Shrek"
Answer: The category of Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001, when "Shrek" won the award over "Monsters, Inc." and "Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius."
"Beauty and the Beast" (1991) was the first animated feature ever to be nominated in the Best Picture category, but it lost, to a film very much its opposite: "The Silence of the Lambs."
The makers of the 1995 "Toy Story" received a special award for having created the first entirely computer-generated animated feature.
Q. 2. Golden Boys:
What living actor has appeared in more films nominated for Best Picture?
1. Russell Crowe
2. Robert De Niro
3. Leonardo DiCaprio
4. Robert Duvall
5. Harrison Ford
6. Gene Hackman
7. Dustin Hoffman
8. Jack Nicholson
9. Al Pacino
Jack Nicholson
Answer: Jack Nicholson has 10 credited appearances in Best Picture nominees: "Five Easy Pieces," "Chinatown," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next," "Reds," "Terms of Endearment," "Prizzi's Honor," "Broadcast News," "A Few Good Men," "As Good As It Gets" and "The Departed" (not to mention an unbilled cameo in "Ragtime").
Robert De Niro has nine (including an uncredited turn in "American Hustle"). Dustin Hoffman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall each has eight (though Ford also filmed a scene for "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" that was cut; you can see him, or at least his shoes, here).
Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino each has six.
Q. 3. Now the ladies:
What living actress has appeared in more films nominated for Best Picture?
2. Olivia De Havilland
3. Sally Field
4. Jane Fonda
5. Diane Keaton
6. Jessica Lange
7. Shirley MacLaine
8. Meryl Streep
9. Kate Winslet
Olivia De Havilland
Answer: Olivia De Havilland's appearances in eight Best Picture nominees ("Captain Blood," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Anthony Adverse," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Gone With the Wind," "Hold Back the Dawn," "The Snake Pit" and "The Heiress") edge out Blanchett (7); Streep (6, including 2017's "The Post"); Keaton (5); Field, MacLaine and Winslet (4 each); Fonda (3); and Lange (2).
Q. 4. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon:
He may be connected to every actor in Hollywood, but Kevin Bacon has appeared in only five films nominated for Best Picture. Name them.
Kevin Bacon
Answer: Kevin Bacon appeared in five Best Picture nominees: "JFK," "A Few Good Men," "Apollo 13," "Mystic River" and "Frost/Nixon."
Q. 5. Trophy shelf:
Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize after a film about his global warming crusade, "An Inconvenient Truth," won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but he wasn't the first whose work was honored at award ceremonies in Hollywood and Scandinavia. There was a famed Nobel Laureate who later went on to win an Academy Award. Who?
George Bernard Shaw
Answer: George Bernard Shaw, winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 1925, won a Best Screenplay Oscar for the 1938 film version of "Pygmalion."
John Steinbeck (nominated for the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat") and Harold Pinter (nominated for "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Betrayal)" also each later earned Nobel Literature Prizes.
Linda Hunt
Answer: Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress as news photographer Billy Kwan in "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1983).
Best Actress Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow played a character who pretended to be a member of the opposite sex in "Shakespeare in Love," but we in the audience knew better.
Q. 7. Worth the wait:
What film won an Oscar 20 years after it was actually made?
"Limelight"
Answer:Because of the blacklist against Charlie Chaplin which led to his exile from the United States, his 1952 film "Limelight" was never shown in Los Angeles until 1972, thus becoming eligible that year for the Academy Awards. Chaplin received an Oscar for Best Score, which he shared with arrangers Ray Rasch and Larry Russell (both of whom were already dead).
Q. 8. "I'd like to thank ...":
Match the acceptance speech remarks with the actor/actress who made them:
B. "Losing would suck and winning would be really scary. And it's really, really scary."
C. "Oh, wow. This is the best drink of water after the longest drought of my life."
D. "My mom's name is Marilyn O'Connor. She's here's tonight. I'd like it if you see her tonight to congratulate her. She brought up four kids alone and she deserves congratulations for that."
E. "I would like you to listen to the beating of your own heart which is the most precious thing in the world."
F. "This is one night I wish I smoked and drank."
G. "Gee, this isn't like I imagined it would be in the bathtub."
1. Ben Affleck
2. James Cameron
3. Philip Seymour Hoffman
4. Grace Kelly
5. Shirley MacLaine
6. Steven Spielberg
7. Dianne Wiest
Thank yous
Answer:
A. (5)
B. (1)
C. (6)
D. (3)
E. (2)
F. (4)
G. (7)
Q. 9. Beginner's Luck:
Who is the only person to win a Best Director Oscar for the first and only film he/she ever directed?
Jerome Robbins
Answer: Jerome Robbins, behind the cameras for the first time on "West Side Story," was fired more than halfway through shooting because of concerns over time and cost overruns, but he later shared the Best Director Academy Award with his replacement, Robert Wise. Robbins never directed another film.
Q. 10. Who was Willie Fulgear?
1. He streaked across the Oscar show stage in 1974, prompting a memorable retort by David Niven.2. He discovered 55 missing Oscar statuettes in a trash bin in 2000.
3. He was MGM's chief art director who designed the now-familiar statue, which replaced the scroll handed out at the first ceremony.
4. He was the "front" who was credited with the screenplay for 1952's "Roman Holiday," penned by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and who ended up winning the award; in 1992 Trumbo was officially (and posthumously) awarded his Oscar.
5. He was the very first recipient of an award at the first ceremony held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, May 16, 1929.
Willie Fulgear
Answer: Willie Fulgear received a $50,000 reward and two tickets to the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony after finding boxes containing 55 of 58 missing Oscar trophies, lost during shipping between the Chicago manufacturer and Los Angeles.
Truck driver Lawrence Edward Ledent was sentenced to six months in prison and five years' probation in connection with the robbery. In 2001, John Willie Harris (a half-brother of Fulgear) pleaded guilty to one count of receiving stolen property and was sentenced to six months in prison, and a dockworker at the shipping company, Anthony Keith Hart, pleaded no contest to receiving stolen property and was sentenced to three years' probation. In curious codas to the discovery, Fulgear later reported that most of the reward money was stolen from his apartment.
Three years later, one of the remaining missing Oscars was found during a drug investigation in Florida.
Q. 11. Solitary nom:
One film received only a single Academy Award nomination, for Best Picture -- and it won. What was it?
"Grand Hotel"
Answer:"Grand Hotel" was only nominated for Best Picture of 1931-32, which it won.
Q. 12. What siblings have both won acting Oscars?
A. Lionel and Ethel Barrymore
B. Jane and Peter Fonda
C. Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty
D. Julia and Eric Roberts
E. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal
The Barrymores
Answer: Lionel Barrymore won an Oscar for Best Actor for "A Free Soul" (1931/320, while his sister Ethel won Best Supporting Actress for "None But the Lonely Heart" (1944).
Though nominated, Eric Roberts, Peter Fonda, and Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal have never won an Oscar.
Warren Beatty -- like sister Shirley MacLaine -- has won, but for directing, not acting.
Q. 13. Pencils up!
Who was the only write-in candidate to win an Academy Award?
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Answer: Hal Mohr was not nominated for his cinematography of the 1935 film, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but he won as a write-in candidate on the final ballot.
Called at home and told he'd won, Mohr and his wife dressed and drove to the Biltmore Hotel to join the party, notes Mason Wiley & Damien Bona's "Inside Oscar."
Under current rules the Academy does not count write-in votes.
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