History MediaNotes / AcademyAward

As of 2023, the Academy gives out the following twenty-three awards each year:

* Creator/BongJoonHo's ''Film/{{Parasite|2019}}'' in 2020 is the first and currently only non-English language film to win Best Picture, though eight films from the United Kingdom and one from France that were in English have won before it. (It also became only the third film to win Best Picture ''and'' the UsefulNotes/PalmeDOr, often regarded as the top prize in international cinema; the others are ''Film/TheLostWeekend'' and ''Film/{{Marty}}''.) In his acceptance speech, he notably mentioned that the Oscars are a ''provincial'' award in the rest of the world. Indeed, the Academy's relationship to world cinema has long been questioned and scrutinized:

** Though [[WesternAnimation/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs the first animated feature film]] was given an honorary Oscar, animated films have struggled mightily to be honored at the Oscars. While Disney's ''WesternAnimation/BeautyAndTheBeast'' was nominated for Best Picture in 1991, most animated films were unable to even be nominated outside of Best Original Score and Song until the [[MediaNotes/AcademyAwardforBestAnimatedFeature Best Animated Film]] category was introduced in 2001. Even then, this was something of a compromise, as some Academy members advocated for the category to be made explicitly so that animation ''couldn't'' be nominated in Best Picture again; since the award's creation, only two (''WesternAnimation/{{Up}}'' and ''WesternAnimation/ToyStory3'') have returned to the category, both only after the number of nominations was increased. To date, ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1'' remains the only animated film to win an Oscar outside of Best Animated Feature or the Music categories when it won for Sound Editing in 2005. Many categories, including Director, Editing, Production Design, and all Acting categories, have never received an animated film ''nomination'' and others are rare, with Pixar's run of screenplay nominations in the 2000s probably being the biggest exception.
** Those who work in animation have also criticized the Academy for massively favoring a certain type of film in their nominations and winners for Animated Feature: computer-generated Western films primarily marketed for children and produced by Disney (or its subsidiary Pixar). To date, ''Anime/SpiritedAway'' is the only non-Western and traditionally animated film to win the category, arguably still the most "mature" winner, and won the statue in just the award's second year; ''WesternAnimation/TheCurseOfTheWereRabbit'' and ''WesternAnimation/GuillermoDelTorosPinocchio'' are the only stop-motion winners. Pixar alone has won more than half of the Animated Feature Oscars, and Disney proper is the runner-up in the win category; they and Creator/DreamWorksAnimation combine for more than half of the ''nominations'' as well.

* There have been seven films that went winless despite receiving 10 or more nominations: ''Film/TheTurningPoint'', ''Film/TheColorPurple1985'' (the co-record holders with 11 nominations), ''Film/GangsOfNewYork'', ''Film/TrueGrit2010'', ''Film/AmericanHustle'', ''Film/TheIrishman'' and ''Film/KillersOfTheFlowerMoon'' (all with 10). Note that Creator/MartinScorsese directed three of the seven.

* 2022's ''Film/{{All Quiet on the Western Front|2022}}'' holds the record of nine nominations for a German film, beating the original record-holder ''Film/DasBoot'' (another German World War film with WarIsHell as CentralTheme, interestingly) with its six nominations.

* ''Film/AllQuietOnTheWesternFront2022'' holds the record of nine nominations for a German film, beating the original record-holder ''Film/DasBoot'' with its six nominations.

* James Ivory is the oldest person to win an Oscar, with ''Film/CallMeByYourName'' winning Best Adapted Screenplay at age 89. Music/JohnWilliams currently holds the record for the oldest Oscar nominee at 91 for his nomination of Best Original Score for ''Film/TheFabelmans''. Before that, the oldest nominee was the late Creator/AgnesVarda for her documentary ''Faces Places''. Varda still holds the record for Oldest Female to be nominated for an Oscar. In addition, she was also eight days Ivory's senior, with both of them nominated at the 90th Academy Awards.

The award's purpose was originally to encourage better filmmaking and promote the industry, so it makes sense that it is presented in a star-studded, multi-hour televised ceremony. Though there are several other {{Award Show}}s of its type, most famously the MediaNotes/{{Golden Globe|Award}}s and UsefulNotes/{{BAFTA}}s, the Oscars are by far the most popular and well-known and are the TropeMaker and TropeCodifier for most things associated with awards ceremony. Due largely to their popularity, receiving an Oscar is incredibly prestigious; it's generally considered the highest honor one can receive for filmmaking.

For tropes about the award presenting show itself, see MediaNotes/AcademyAwardsCeremonies. For a list of winners in the Best Picture, Best Director, and acting categories, see UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardWinners.

The award's purpose was originally to encourage better filmmaking and promote the industry, so it makes sense that it is presented in a star-studded, multi-hour televised ceremony. Though there are several other {{Award Show}}s of its type, most famously the UsefulNotes/{{Golden Globe|Award}}s and UsefulNotes/{{BAFTA}}s, the Oscars are by far the most popular and well-known and are the TropeMaker and TropeCodifier for most things associated with awards ceremony. Due largely to their popularity, receiving an Oscar is incredibly prestigious; it's generally considered the highest honor one can receive for filmmaking.

For tropes about the award presenting show itself, see UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardsCeremonies. For a list of winners in the Best Picture, Best Director, and acting categories, see UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardWinners.

** The [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestForeignLanguageFilm International Feature Film]] category (known before the 2020 awards as "Best Foreign Language Film") is notorious for extremely complicated rules, including that a country can only submit one film to the Academy for nomination consideration. It's also subject to the rules about television airings; Japan wanted to submit ''Shall We Dance?'' in 1997, but it had already had a TV airing in its home country and was disqualified. (They submitted ''Anime/PrincessMononoke'' instead; it didn't get a nomination.) The category's existence was meant to expand the Oscars' influence worldwide, but it likely also had the side-effect of siloing international nominees to that single category.

** For the first three Academy Awards, the Best Actor and Best Actress awards were given for the best body of work within a year (rather than an individual performance in a film), and the winners of the awards would announce the same category that they won in for the next ceremony. The latter stopped because Norma Shearer was nominated two years in a row (she was nominated in 1931 after winning in 1930), which put her in the potentially awkward position of naming herself as the winner. Ever since, they've been announced by the previous year's winner of the opposite gender category.

** ''Film/EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce'' won more awards in the above-the-line categories (Picture, Director, and the Acting and Screenplay awards) than any film in the ceremony's history, with six of the possible seven. The only category it missed out on, Best Actor, was due to the film not having one eligible to be nominated (the male performer with the most screentime was nominated and won for Supporting). This came in ''spite'' of it being a sci-fi/action film (see those genres' historic difficulties below). Ironically, its low budget meant that it performed far less well below-the-line than most critically acclaimed genre pictures, with only a win in Editing.

** The division of acting awards into male and female categories have been questioned by certain commentators and even smaller awards shows for years, both by those who think that all the actors should compete with each other regardless of gender and those who believe the binary division has contributed to the exclusion of trans and nonbinary performers, who understandably reject being placed in either category. However, the Oscars have been in no hurry to remove the gender division, in part because of concerns that the Acting category would follow the pattern of all the other categories and become much ''less'' diverse. [[https://www.statista.com/statistics/641377/oscar-nominees-gender-distribution/ Cisgender men dominate almost every other category in nominations and wins by a wide margin]], and any progress on that front has been much too slow for most women in the Academy to feel secure in eliminating the dedicated Actress categories.
*** The existing individual above-the-line category that's ''not'' gender-divided, Best Director, is the most commonly cited example of the Oscars' gender disparity. Even after nearly a century of awards, you can still count the number of women director nominees on your fingers. The first, Creator/LinaWertmuller for ''Film/SevenBeauties'', didn't come until ''1975''; the next two came decades later (Creator/JaneCampion, 1993 and Creator/SofiaCoppola, 2003). The first winner, Creator/KathrynBigelow, was only the fourth woman nominee; her victory for ''Film/TheHurtLocker'' in 2009 famously involved her beating out her ex-husband, Creator/JamesCameron (for ''Avatar'')[[note]]Cameron had already won ''three'' Oscars for ''Film/{{Titanic 1997}}''.[[/note]]. The next winner, 2020-21's Creator/ChloeZhao with ''Film/{{Nomadland}}'' (which also won Best Picture), was the first and only woman of color to even be nominated. A year later, Campion's win for ''Film/ThePowerOfTheDog'' made for the first and only time a woman was nominated twice and that a woman won Best Director for two consecutive years. While these changes indicate a shift, it remains a small one. To put it blunty, the Oscars would have to nominate almost exclusively women for over a century to even the scales; they have only nominated more than one in a year once (2020-21) and once again nominated none in 2022.

** The superhero genre has historically struggled to gain recognition for the Oscars. While plenty are nominated for technical categories, most often Best Visual Effects, very few actually end up winning those awards. When it comes to the big awards, ''Film/TheDarkKnight'' was infamously snubbed a Best Picture nomination in 2008, though it did get a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination for Creator/HeathLedger, which it won. Since then, ''Film/{{Black Panther|2018}}'' and ''Film/{{Joker|2019}}'' managed to get significant attention attention in the major categories, with Creator/JoaquinPhoenix managing to win Best Actor for ''Joker'', but neither managed to win Best Picture. ''Film/BlackPantherWakandaForever'' also received many nominations in 2022, but not one for Best Picture. Three superhero films have also won Best Animated Feature: ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1'', ''WesternAnimation/BigHero6'', and ''WesternAnimation/SpiderManIntoTheSpiderVerse''. ''WesternAnimation/Incredibles2'' was also nominated, but lost to ''Spider-Verse''. ''Film/{{Logan}}'' was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2017, but didn't win.

** Those who work in animation have also criticized the Academy for massively favoring a certain type of film in their nominations and winners for Animated Feature: computer-generated Western films primarily marketed for children and produced by Disney (or its subsidary Pixar). To date, ''Anime/SpiritedAway'' is the only non-Western and traditionally animated film to win the category, arguably still the most "mature" winner, and won the statue in just the award's second year; ''WesternAnimation/TheCurseOfTheWereRabbit'' and ''WesternAnimation/GuillermoDelTorosPinocchio'' are the only stop-motion winners. Pixar alone has won more than half of the Animated Feature Oscars, and Disney proper is the runner-up in the win category; they and Creator/DreamWorksAnimation combine for more than half of the ''nominations'' as well.

** The nature of the category also allows for some oddities, such as installments of non-American television series being nominated as long as the documentaries haven't aired in the US; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs program ''Film/TheFifthEstate'' received several such nominations as a result. Multi-part and limited series were originally eligible for the documentary feature award, but were eventually made ineligible after the contentious victory of the nearly 8-hour ''Film/OJMadeInAmerica'' in 2017.
** The first "Best Documentary" award was for feature films and short subjects both, and featured ''four'' winners and 24 nominees. Starting with 1943, the second time the award was given, the Academy made a distinction between features and short subjects.

* At the 1934 Oscars, the public were able to contribute to the votes. Creator/BetteDavis had lobbied really hard to play Mildred in ''Literature/OfHumanBondage''. Warner Bros let her to do so (the film was for their rival RKO) only because they thought the film would sink without a trace. When the film became a smash hit and turned Bette into a star, Jack Warner tried to campaign to stop her being nominated for Best Actress. When she was snubbed, audiences protested and she was allowed as a write-in vote. Claudette Colbert won for ''Film/ItHappenedOneNight'', but the scandal caused the Academy to permanently change their voting procedures. Davis won the following year for ''Dangerous'' in what was universally seen as an open apology (a contemporary report said she could have won that year for playing a paramecium in ''The Story of Louis Pasteur'').

* While there are several winners that have refused to go to the ceremony to accept the award in person, such as Creator/WoodyAllen and Creator/KatharineHepburn, there are two instances of an nominee flat out rejecting the award, usually to make a point:

* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestPicture Best Picture]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestDirecting Best Directing]]
* [[{{UsefulNotes/Academy Award For Best Actor In A Leading Role}} Best Actor in a Leading Role]]
* [[{{UsefulNotes/Academy Award For Best Actor in a Supporting Role}} Best Actor in a Supporting Role]]
* [[{{UsefulNotes/Academy Award For Best Actress in a Leading Role}} Best Actress in a Leading Role]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestActressInASupportingRole Best Actress in a Supporting Role]]

* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestAnimatedShortFilm Best Animated Short Film]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestCinematography Best Cinematography]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestCostumeDesign Best Costume Design]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestDocumentaryFeature Best Documentary Feature]]

* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestFilmEditing Best Film Editing]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestForeignLanguageFilm Best International Feature Film]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestLiveActionShortFilm Best Live-Action Short Film]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestMakeupAndHairstyling Best Makeup and Hairstyling]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestOriginalScore Best Original Score]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestOriginalSong Best Original Song]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestProductionDesign Best Production Design]]

* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestVisualEffects Best Visual Effects]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestAdaptedScreenplay Best Adapted Screenplay]]
* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestOriginalScreenplay Best Original Screenplay]]

** Though [[WesternAnimation/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs the first animated feature film]] was given an honorary Oscar, animated films have struggled mightily to be honored at the Oscars. While Disney's ''WesternAnimation/BeautyAndTheBeast'' was nominated for Best Picture in 1991, most animated films were unable to even be nominated outside of Best Original Score and Song until the [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardforBestAnimatedFeature Best Animated Film]] category was introduced in 2001. Even then, this was something of a compromise, as some Academy members advocated for the category to be made explicitly so that animation ''couldn't'' be nominated in Best Picture again; since the award's creation, only two (''WesternAnimation/{{Up}}'' and ''WesternAnimation/ToyStory3'') have returned to the category, both only after the number of nominations was increased. To date, ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1'' remains the only animated film to win an Oscar outside of Best Animated Feature or the Music categories when it won for Sound Editing in 2005. Many categories, including Director, Editing, Production Design, and all Acting categories, have never received an animated film ''nomination'' and others are rare, with Pixar's run of screenplay nominations in the 2000s probably being the biggest exception.

* [[UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestAnimatedFeature Best Animated Feature]]