Feuds, Frauds and Curtain Rods...the Secret Life of Oscar
                                                                            by Jake Spaulding

        Hundreds of millions of people around the world tune in each year to the Academy Awards. But how well do you really know Hollywood's grand prize? We've gathered up some fascinating bits and pieces to enlighten even the most

hard-core awards wonks. The nominees are...

        1. The Academy Awards statuette was designed in 1928 by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, who doodled it during an early meeting of the fledgling Academy. An unemployed sculptor named George Stanley was paid $500 to produce

the first batch of Oscars. The design has not changed since, except for the number of holes in the film spool upon which the Oscar figure stands. In 1929, the spool had five holes, which represented the five branches of the Academy; now it has 13 holes, for 13 branches.

        2. The red carpet that leads into the new Kodak Theater for this year's Oscar show will run through a shopping mall, past more than two dozen stores. Stars walking the carpet will not, however, be able to stop and shop: At the insistence of the Academy, the mall architecture includes removable signs and curtain rods that allow the storefronts to be completely hidden.

        3. The first Academy Awards ceremony, which took place in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929, was a dinner for 270 Academy members and guests. The menu included consomme, filet of sole, broiled chicken, string beans and potatoes, Waxed candy replicas of the Oscar statuette graced every table, just as Wolfgang Puck's gold-wrapped chocolate Oscars now adorn each table at the Governor's Ball. Winners were chosen by a panel of five judges, although MGM chief Louis B. Mayer sat in on the deliberations to, he said,“supervise.”

        4. Eight years before appearing as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, a 13-year-old Elijah Wood made his first appearance at the Academy Awards. He was a last-minute replacement for Macaulay Culkin, who had been slated to present the Visual Effects Oscar but was quietly booted off the show when he insisted his lines be rewritten.

        5. To obtain the broadcast rights to the Academy Awards ceremony, ABC pays the Academy about $20 million per year. This is enough to bankroll virtually the entire annual operating budget of the Academy.

        6. Before winning Academy Awards for Schindler's List (in 1994) and Saving Private Ryan (in 1998), Steven Spielberg was routinely overlooked by Academy voters, repeatedly losing (or not even being nominated) despite such films as The Color Purple, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. His first notable snub came in 1975, when he was not nominated for Best Director, despite the Best Picture nomination for his film Jaws. Spielberg had invited a crew to film him as the nominations were announced, thus immortalizing his unfortunate reaction: "I can't believe it. They went for Fellini instead of me."

        7. At the 1934 Oscars, emcee Will Rogers opened the Best Picture envelope and said, "Come on up and get it, Frank!" Director Frank Capra, who expected to win for Lady for a Day, jumped out of his seat and made his way to the stage--but before he reached it, he realized Rogers had been speaking to Cavalcade director Frank Lloyd. A humiliated Capra vowed to never again attend the Academy Awards--a vow that evaporated the following year, when he won for It Happened One Night. Shortly thereafter, Capra was elected president of the Academy.

        8. Henry Fonda's wife Shirlee, who was not an Academy member, once admitted to the late film critic Gene Siskel that she had frequently filled out her husband's Oscar ballot. Other Academy wives, she added, had done the same. "I'm sure thiments. "Anyone who talks about it, however, is very foolish."

        9. The Academy controls which advertisements can be shown during the Oscar telecast. The organization does not permit any film ads to be shown, and it also bans commercials from amusement parks whose titles include the name of a movie studio. For example, Six Flags could advertise during the Oscars, but Disneyland and Universal Studios Florida could not. This year, because of decreased ad spending in the troubled economy, ABC lowered the price of an ad on the Oscar show
to about $1 million per 30 seconds, down from last year's $1.3 million.

        10. When Jack Palance won a Supporting Actor Oscar for City Slickers in 1992, he set a record for the longest gap between initial nomination and victory. He had first been nominated forty years earlier, for Sudden Fear.

        11. During WWII, to conserve on materials, Oscar statuettes were made of plaster rather than tin, copper and gold plate. When the war was over, recipients of the plaster Oscars, including Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman, were belatedly given the real thing.

        12. Jessica Tandy is the oldest person ever to win an Academy Award for acting. She won the Best Actress award in 1989 for Driving Miss Daisy, at the age of 80 years, 293 days. The Supporting Actress category boasts the youngest acting winner, Tatum O'Neal, who was 10 years and 148 days old when she won for Paper Moon in 1973. (Shirley Temple received an honorary Oscar in 1934, when she was five.)

        13. Throughout the 1930s, newspapers were given advance notice of Oscar winners so they could publish the results the night of the ceremony. In 1937, Best Actress nominee Gladys George took advantage of this by leaving her seat and strolling through the press room, where she learned she'd lost to Luise Rainer. In the women's room, George broke the news to odds-on favorite Carole Lombard that she, too, was a loser. Three years later, after some guests bought the late edition of the Los Angeles Times and read the results on their way to the Oscar ceremony, the Academy opted for sealed envelopes and extreme secrecy.