Justin Henry, then 8 and the actor who played the young boy in 1979’s Kramer vs Kramer, was the youngest Oscar nominee in history.

The youngest winner for the Best Actor Oscar was Richard Dreyfuss, at 29, for 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. Marlee Matlin, at age 21, was the youngest female to win an Oscar for Best Actress, for the film Children of a Lesser God.

The youngest winner for the Best Actor Oscar was Richard Dreyfuss, at 29, for 1977’s The Goodbye Girl.

The youngest person to win an Academy Award to date is Tatum O’Neal, who was 10 when she won for Paper Moon in 1973. (Shirley Temple received an honorary Oscar when she was 6.)

The only actors who have directed themselves to Best Actor Oscars are Laurence Olivier for 1948’s Hamlet and Roberto Benigni for 1998’s Life Is Beautiful.

The first Oscar Awards ceremony took place on May 16, 1929, during a banquet in The Blossom Room of The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Between 250 and 270 people attended (accounts vary).

The sealed envelope system for announcing Oscar winners was adopted in 1941. Prior to that the winners were known in advance because the names were given to newspapers before to the ceremony.

Each Oscar statue, officially called The Academy Award of Merit, is 13½ inches tall and weighs 8½ pounds. The statue depicts a knight holding a crusader’s sword, standing on a reel of film.

Waxed candy replicas of the Oscar statuette graced every table during the first Academy Awards ceremony in May 1929, just as Wolfgang Puck’s gold-wrapped chocolate Oscars now adorn each table at the Governor’s Ball.

When Jack Palance won a Supporting Actor Oscar for City Slickers in 1992, he set a record for the longest gap between initial nomination and victory. He had first been nominated forty years earlier, for Sudden Fear.

To conserve on materials during World War II, Oscar statuettes were made of plaster rather than tin, copper and gold plate. When the war was over, recipients of the plaster Oscars were belatedly given the real thing.