— Bennett Miller spent eight years trying to make Foxcatcher and nearly as many waiting for the offer of Capote to come along.
— Alejandro González Iñárritu made four Oscar-nominated films.
The Best Picture and Best Animated Feature nominees have made a whopping $1,431,340,726 so far this year. But it’s the cartoons which have made the biggest dent in punters’ pockets.
But they cost more to make:
Animated films also made a much bigger dent in studios’ budgets, too, however. Song of the Sea cost €6 million to make, but has only taken €360,000 at the box office.
This was a cheap year for making Best Picture nominees:
In comparison, the Best Picture nominees this year were pretty cheap — and proportionally they made far more money. Boyhood and Birdman had tiny budgets, of just $4 million and $3.3 million respectively.
If the public were voting, American Sniper would win Best Picture:
The Imitation Game, American Sniper and The Testament of Youth all impressed audiences more than critics, while Selma, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel were more underwhelming for moviegoers than the reviews might suggest.
Eddie Redmayne wore prosthetic ears, mouthpieces, shoulders, kneecaps and even hands to mark the decline in Professor Stephen Hawking’s condition in The Theory of Everything.
Tilda Swinton was transformed by Oscar-nominated Harry Potter make-up artist Mark Coulier with a silicone rubber mask. Her castmate Harvey Keitel was given a fake broken nose and bald cap to play the jailhouse boss in the film.
Steve Carrell wore a prosthetic nose in Foxcatcher, which was actually larger than John du Pont’s, the real-life schizophrenic millionaire he won an Oscar nomination for playing.
While they weren’t attached to anything, American Sniper’s plastic babies caused quite the stir.
A lot more men were nominated for Oscars this year than women, 77 more, to be precise:
Also, the vast majority of the nominees are white:
Middle-aged nominees fare better:
The average age of Best Actor winner is 45. At 40, Bradley Cooper’s closest, and Michael Keaton is furthest away. If Bafta-winner Eddie Redmayne wins, he’ll be the second youngest Briton to win after Daniel Day-Lewis picked up the award at 32 for My Left Foot.
Historically, Best Actress winners have been 38, which means Marion Cotillard (39), Reese Witherspoon (38) and Rosamund Pike (36) are all close contenders.
Favourite to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar JK Simmons, 60, could bump up the current average age of Supporting Actor winners, which is 52. Emma Stone and Keira Knightley, at 26 and 29 respectively, are considerably younger than 40: the average age of previous Supporting Actress winners.
And there’s a scarily small age gap between Reese Witherspoon and her on-screen mother, Laura Dern
If Reese Witherspoon doesn’t win, she’ll still be richest
Reportedly, at least. The Wild star’s estimated career wealth far surpasses that of her fellow nominees.
This year’s Best Actress and Best Actor nominees are basically all the same height
There’s less than a foot between the shortest (Witherspoon, 1.56m or 5’1″) and the tallest (Bradley Cooper, 1.85m or 6′), which means they will all line up nicely in photos.
