The first movie ever to win the Best Picture Academy Award was the World War l saga Wings in 1928.

The Oscars were originally a private function, conducted over little more than an hour, with the winners informed of their success before the awards were handed out.

Although Judy Garland’s slippers are ruby red in the movie, in the book of The Wizard of Oz, they are silver. The movie makers wanted to take full advantage of their color technology, so they changed them for the film. 

Both Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn were considered for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind before it eventually went to Vivien Leigh.

The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw won an Oscar for the adapted screenplay of his play Pygmalion, which was made into a film in 1938. He was not pleased. In fact, Shaw wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, nor the movie adaptation, and called the award an “insult” to his original work.

On the poster for the classic movie Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is shown wearing a fedora and trench coat. The picture doesn’t come from Casablanca but was painted based on another of his movies, Across the Pacific.

The first person to win an Oscar for a Shakespearean adaptation was Sir Laurence Oliver. He won Best Actor and, as producer, Best Picture, for his role in Hamlet in 1948.

The Oscars were first broadcast on television in 1953.