14 Fun Facts From The 2015 Oscar Nominations

The Oscar nominees are in, and while there were a few egregious snubs that quickly riled up the Internet (really, no ‘Lego Movie’?), there’s still a class of very deserving folks who did some remarkable work on the big screen last year. Let’s have some fun with their Oscar stats:

1. This is the first time there are eight movies competing for Best Picture. In the three years since the Academy modified its voting process to make the number of films eligible in its top race anywhere between five and ten (it’s complicated), the magic number has been nine. This year, however, only eight made the cut (‘American Sniper’, ‘Birdman’, ‘Boyhood’, ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, ‘The Imitation Game’, ‘Selma’, ‘The Theory of Everything’), leaving other contenders like ‘Foxcatcher’ and ‘Gone Girl’ in the cold.

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2. Bradley Cooper earns his third consecutive acting nomination. The American Sniper star was something of a surprise in the Best Actor category, where he edged out favorites like David Oyelowo (‘Selma’) and Jake Gyllenhaal (‘Nightcrawler’). He’s been on a roll: This nod marks his third in a row after ‘American Hustle’ and ‘Silver Linings Playbook’. He’s also a nominee this year for producing ‘Sniper’, a Best Picture contender.

3. Meryl Streep now has a whopping 19 Oscar nominations. It’s no wonder she’s considered one of the greatest performers of all time. Streep, nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for singing and dancing her way through ‘Into the Woods’, added to her current record, which is now seven more than the nearest actors (Jack Nicholson and Katharine Hepburn both have 12). Among this year’s acting class, Robert Duvall (‘The Judge’) has the second most nominations with seven.

4. Streep isn’t the only 2015 nominee with a boatload of Oscar nominations. Cinematographer Roger Deakins — who has incredibly never won an Oscar — landed his 12th nomination for ‘Unbroken’. Clint Eastwood earned his 11th as a producer on ‘American Sniper’ (though he was left out of the Best Director race), and has won four. Costume designer Colleen Atwood also nabbed her 11th nom for ‘Into the Woods’; she’s won three times before. And famed composer Hans Zimmer got a 10th nomination (Best Original Score for ‘Interstellar’); he’s won once.

5. Of the nominees, Laura Dern has the biggest gap between acting nominations at 23 years. The last time the ‘Wild’ star was nominated for an Oscar was in 1992, for her role in the drama ‘Rambling Rose’. Her co-star in that film, Robert Duvall, owns the second biggest gap — his last nod came in 1999 for ‘A Civil Action’. And in a case of like father, like daughter, Dern’s dad Bruce had an even larger gap when he was nominated in 2014 for ‘Nebraska’; his previous nomination had come 35 years earlier for ‘Coming Home’.

6. Almost half of the acting nominees are first timers. Of the 20 contenders in Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, nine got their name called for the first time: Felicity Jones (‘The Theory of Everything’), Rosamund Pike (‘Gone Girl’), Steve Carell (‘Foxcatcher’), Benedict Cumberbatch (‘The Imitation Game’), Michael Keaton (‘Birdman’), Eddie Redmayne (‘The Theory of Everything’), Patricia Arquette (‘Boyhood’), Emma Stone (‘Birdman’), and J.K. Simmons (‘Whiplash’). And at least three of these folks — Keaton, Arquette and Simmons — are the early favorites to win.

7. Alexandre Desplat’s double nominations for Best Original Score aren’t that rare for musicians. The French composer was nominated for both ‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, and now has eight nods total (he’s yet to win). It’s nothing new in the musical category. John Williams (who has 49 total nominations) has competed against himself in the Best Original Score category six times: in 1985 (‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and ‘The River’), 1988 (‘Empire of the Sun’ and ‘Witches of Eastwick’), 1990 (‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’), 2002 (‘A.I.’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’), 2006 (‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and ‘Munich’) and 2012 (‘War Horse’ and ‘The Adventures of Tintin’). That’s not even counting other years where he was a double nominee in the two different Score categories the academy used to honour.

8. It’s a battle of Hulks in Best Supporting Actor. As we pointed out around the Golden Globes, there are two men who played Hulk on the big screen facing off against one another: Edward Norton (‘Birdman’), who played the big green guy in 2008’s ‘The Incredible Hulk’, and Mark Ruffalo (‘Foxcatcher’), currently smashing about in the Avengers movies. Oscar had no love though for Eric Bana’s turn in ‘Deliver Us From Evil’ or Lou Ferrigno’s in ‘Moms’ Night Out’.

9. Bennett Miller sees his film get a rare kind of snub. As Fandango correspondent/walking Oscar encyclopedia Dave Karger points out, the ‘Foxcatcher’ filmmaker becomes the first helmer since the Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees to get a Best Director nomination, and yet not see his film represented in the night’s top race.

10. Rosamund Pike is the third Bond Girl to get a nomination. The actress, who scored the only nomination for ‘Gone Girl’ (for Best Actress), first burst onto the scene as the icy Miranda Frost in Pierce Brosnan’s final Bond flick, ‘Die Another Day’. She becomes the third woman to have the distinction of being both “Bond girl” and “Oscar nominee.” And good news for Pike: Both women before her, Halle Berry (who co-starred with Pike in ‘Die’) and Kim Basinger (‘Never Say Never Again’), were winners; Berry for Monster’s Ball and Basinger for L.A. Confidential. Then, of course, there’s seven-time nominee Judi Dench — but she’s more like a Bond queen.

11. The Oscar race started at Sundance. Among the eight Best Picture nominees, two debuted a year ago, at last January’s Sundance Film Festival: Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ and Damien Chazelle’s ‘Whiplash’. While there have been a handful of Sundance entries that made it to the top race over the years, it’s rare for there to be more than one. That’s only happened twice: in 2009 (‘An Education’ and ‘Precious’) and 2010 (‘Winter’s Bone’ and ‘The Kids Are All Right’).

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12. There are no blockbusters (yet) in the Best Picture race. Most pundits expected David Fincher’s hit thriller ‘Gone Girl’ to get nominated here, but its absence leaves us without a single movie to in the top category to have made over $100 million at the box office. The highest grossing among the contenders is ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, which collected $59 million. In fact, if you add up the box office totals (so far) for all eight Best Picture nominees, at roughly $194 million, it’s not even close to matching the haul of the year’s highest grossing movie, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ ($330 million). Of course, ‘American Sniper’ and ‘Selma’ haven’t gone wide yet, and both have the potential to make some noise at the box office.

13. Fox Searchlight led all studios with 20 nominations. It was a good day for the indie arm of 20th Century Fox. Their two major contenders, ‘Birdman’ and ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, lead the way with nine nominations apiece, while Wild picked up an additional two (for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively). Sony Pictures Classics was a close second with 18 nods, and Warner Bros. third with 16. Overall, indie and mid-major studios dominated the day with 72 total nominations, versus 39 among “The Big Six” (WB, Paramount, Disney, Sony, Fox, and Universal). You can see the full breakdown on Deadline.

14. ‘Zombieland’ gets fully Oscar-fied. Thanks to Emma Stone’s nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category, all four leads from Ruben Fleischer’s 2009 flesh-eater favorite have now been Oscar-nominated: In addition to Stone, there’s Woody Harrelson (‘The Messenger’ and ‘The People Vs. Larry Flynt’); Jesse Eisenberg (‘The Social Network’); and Abigail Breslin (‘Little Miss Sunshine’). And, of course, their brilliant cameo co-star, Bill Murray, also earned a nod, for ‘Lost in Translation’. (H/t Reddit)

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Image credits: 20th Century Fox/Disney/Sony Pictures