30 Prestigious Facts About The Oscars AKA The Academy Awards

The Budget for the Makeup of Dallas Buyers Club was $250. The film would go on to win the Oscar for Best Makeup.

Anna Paquin went to an audition of "The Piano" because she had nothing better to do. Selected among 5,000 candidates for the role in "The Piano", she earned the 1993 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 11 making her the second-youngest Oscar winner in history.

In 2005, Kate Winslet joked that acting in a Holocaust movie guarantees an Oscar. Four years later, she won her first and only Oscar for her role in The Reader.

Christoph Waltz is the first and, thus far is the only actor to win an Oscar for acting in a Quentin Tarantino film.

As production for American Beauty began, DreamWorks approached twenty established directors, including several A-listers, all who turned down the project before they agreed to let Sam Mendes, a theater director, do it. It won Best Picture and Mendes won Best Director at the 2000 Oscars.

Forrest Gump beat 'The Shawshank Redemption' and 'Pulp Fiction' to win the Oscar for the Best Picture in 1995. Also, Tom Hanks beat Morgan Freeman and John Travolta to win the Best Actor in the same year.

Oscar winners must sign an agreement stating that should they wish to sell their statuettes, they must first offer them to the Academy for $1. If they refuse, they cannot keep their trophy.

Nobody is sure how the academy awards came to be called "Oscars".

Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for 'Silence of the Lambs' with only 16 minutes of screentime.

Jim Carrey offered Nicolas Cage to co-star with him in 'Dumb and Dumber' (1994), however, Cage wanted to do a much smaller movie instead called Leaving Las Vegas. 'Leaving Las Vegas' (1995) ended up earning Nicolas Cage an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1996.