16th May: The first Academy Awards

The first academy awards ceremony was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929. It was at a private dinner for just 270 people (now it's estimated that 700 million people watch it around the world). Tickets cost $5 (equivalent of $65 today). The ceremony lasted just 15 minutes. Here are 10 things you may not know about the Oscars:

1. An Oscar statuette's vital statistics are - 34cm (13 and a half inches) tall, five and a quarter inches is the diameter of the base, and it weighs 3kg (eight and a half pounds). It depicts a knight standing on a film reel and holding a sword. The reel has five spokes, which represent the five original branches of the Academy (writers, technicians, producers, actors and directors). They are made from gold plated britannia metal although the first ones were gold plated bronze. During World War II they were made out of plaster because of the metal shortages.
2. The designer of the statue was Cedric Gibbons, who was the Chief Art Director at MGM. He persuaded actor/director Emilio Fernandez to pose nude for his design. Gibbons went on to win 11 of the statuettes himself for design.
3. The youngest Oscar winner was Tatum O'Neal, who won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon in 1973, when she was ten. The oldest is Christopher Plummer who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Beginners in 2010. He was 82. The oldest person ever to be nominated was Gloria Stuart, who was 87 when nominated for playing the old Rose in Titanic in 1997.
4. The most nominated films are Titanic and All About Eve with 14 each. The most Oscars to be won by a film is 11, which has been achieved by three films: Ben-Hur, Titanic and Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King.
5. Katherine Hepburn is the actress who has won the most Oscars - she won four. Meryl Streep has been nominated the most times for acting awards - 16. The male actor to receive the most nominations is Jack Nicholson with 12. However, the person to receive the most nominations ever is a composer - John Williams, who has been nominated 49 times. The person who won the most is not an actor, either - it's Walt Disney, who won a whopping 32.
6. Songs from stage musicals are not eligible for a Best Song Oscar.
7. In 2000, 55 Oscars were stolen. 53 of them were returned or found, but two of them are still out there.
8. The first winner was Emil Jannings, who won Best Actor for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. It was 34 years before the first black actor won - Sidney Poitier, for Lilies Of The Field in 1963, although the first black actress winner was a few years before that - Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for Gone With The Wind in 1940.
9. Since 1950, winners are required to sign a form promising not to sell their Oscar without offering it to the Academy first for a measly one dollar. However, pre-1950 winners have no such restriction, and Harold Russell sold his in 1992 for $60,500. He used the money to pay his wife's medical bills.
10. The opening of a sealed envelope to find out the winner dates from 1941, and was introduced because the year before, the LA Times had broken the embargo and published the names of all the winners before the ceremony.