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In anticipation to the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony, which will be held on April 25, I have decided to write a series of articles related to the most prestigious awards in the movie industry. Two weeks ago I talked about the birth of the Academy Awards , and last week I wrote about Wings (1927), the first ever film to win the statuette for Best Picture. For this week, I bring you 10 interesting facts about the Academy Awards, plus some bonus facts. (All of these stand true as of the writing of this post; changes may occur in the future. )   1. The least and most expensive Best Picture winners Moonlight (2017), directed by Barry Jenkins, is the lowest-budgeted film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, with a cost of $1.5 million. In contrast, James Cameron's Titanic (1997) is the most expensive winner, with a budget of $200 million. Bonus fact: Moonlight is also the first film with an all-black cast to win the same award.     2. Dual nominations for the same role Barry F...

I started this blog six years ago as a way to share my passion for classic films and the Old Hollywood era. I used to watch dozens of classic films every month, and every time I discovered a new star I liked I would go and watch their entire filmography. But somewhere along the way, that passion dimmed down. For instance, I watched 73 classic films in 2016, and only 10 in 2020. The other day, I found this film with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. that I had never heard of, and for some reason it made me really excited about Old Hollywood again. It made me really miss the magic of that era and all the wonderful actors and actresses that graced the silver screen. And it also made me think of all the reasons why I fell in love with classic films in the first place. I came up with 80 reasons, which I thought would be fun to share with you. Most of them are just random little scenes or quirky little quotes, but put them together and they spell Old Hollywood to me. Yesterday I posted part one ; here i...

The Golden Age of Hollywood was all about the glitz and glamour. Movie stars were fashion icons, western heroes, brooding outsiders, average Joes, and femme fatales. Some had careers that spanned decades, others were short-lived in their success, and most of them were no strangers to scandal. In such crazy times as these, there are bound to exist some wild facts about the stars and films that made Old Hollywood legendary. I've rounded up 10 of them. In all honesty, they're not really «wild» facts; they're more like random, useless tidbits. 1. When Clark Gable appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night (1934), women across the nation stopped buying the garment for their husbands. This caused a depression in undershirts in the United States in the 1930s. In 1957, Gable said, «I didn't know what I was doing to the undershirt people. That was just the way I lived. I hadn't worn an undershirt since I'd started school. They made me feel hemmed in and...

The 1930s were a decade of great political and economic turmoil. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the entire world was consumed by an economic downfall called the Great Depression, which led to widespread unemployment and poverty. As a result, authoritarian political movements emerged in several countries in South America and Europe. Notorious among them was Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in Germany, whose expansionist policy resulted in the outbreak of World War II a few months before the end of the decade. In between, Gandhi walked to the Arabian Sea in the Salt March, a civil war established an authoritarian dictatorship in Spain, the Hindenburg exploded over New Jersey, Amelia Earhart became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and the Empire of Japan invaded China. (from left to right) Gandhi and his followers during the Salt March (March-April 1930); Japanese troops entering Manchuria (September 1931); the Hindenburg disaster (May 1937); German troo...