oscars

Before the 89th Academy Awards airs this Sunday (February 26), here are ten fun facts you probably didn't know about this year's Oscars.

Each year’s ceremony usually yields a handful of viral moments, little unexpected happenings that catch the public’s interest and make their way around social media platforms. Last year, the surprise selfie taken by host Ellen Degeneres quickly set Twitter ablaze, racking up millions of retweets and favorites in a matter of minutes. This year’s ceremony re-set that bar, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s long-awaited Best Actor win now the most-tweeted Oscar moment of all time.

IT FINALLY HAPPENED. Leonardo DiCaprio has won his very first Academy Award. Whether you were rooting for or against ‘The Revenant’, whether you think he deserved the award for his grunting and groaning as Hugh Glass or just wanted him to win a damn Oscar already, it doesn’t matter. He’s officially in the Oscar club now.

Brie Larson won Best Actress at the 2016 Oscars for her performance as Ma in Room, beating out fellow nominees Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Jennifer Lawrence and Saoirse Ronan.

With the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, all eyes where on 2016 Oscars host Chris Rock as he returned to add a little diversity to this year’s Academy Awards, and he did not disappoint.

In a Variety exclusive late on Friday, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences announced that they had dumped two of the five scheduled performances of the Best Original Song nominees from this Sunday’s upcoming telecast. Ordinarily, the news that the notoriously lengthy Oscar ceremony would be shortened in any way at all would be cause for celebration, but the particulars of this decision should give readers pause. It’s true that the song performances can be the most time-consuming parts of the show, and though they’re definitely the least necessary, it’s some real bull-tonky that the show would appear only to cut the performances without adequate star-power behind them.

Yesterday, at the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the organization pulled back the curtain on a new innovation designed to streamline acceptance speeches.

14 actors.