Fun Oscar Facts!

- Joel & Ethan Coen have never won an Academy Award for their directing. Their only Oscar comes from Best Screenplay for Fargo.

- Joel Coen is married to actress Frances McDormand.

- The Coen brothers refused to give Josh Brolin (Llewelyn Moss) an audition for No Country for Old Men. Brolin had directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino direct an audition tape for him, helping him to get the part.

- The hairstyle of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in NCFOM, was modeled from a photograph of a 1979 brothel patron. 

- While filming on location in Texas, the Coen brothers had to stop a day of filming after a dark black cloud of smoke appeared in the sky, ruining the shot. The dark cloud turned out to be the result of director Paul Thomas Anderson practicing oil derrick pyrotechnics on the set of There Will be Blood. The Coen brothers were able to resume filming the next day, after the smoke finally dissipated. 

- Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood) had his first big break directing Boogie Nights.

- Paul Thomas Anderson has never won an Academy Award.

- Paul Thomas Anderson dated Fiona Apple for 2 years. Currently he is dating SNL actress, Maya Rudolph. The 2 have a daughter, Pearl, together.

- Daniel Day-Lewis is married to the daughter of famous playwright, Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman).

- Michael Clayton is the only film in the 2008 Academy Awards to obtain more than one acting nomination.

- Viggo Mortensen briefly dated the daughter of another '08 nominee. He dated Lola Schnabel, Julian Schnabel's (The Diving Bell & the Butterfly) daughter for 2 years.

- Viggo Mortensen is multi-talented. He speaks 6 languages - 4 fluently. He is a published poet and currently owns his own publishing company. He is an accomplished photographer - having an exhibit at the Robert Mann gallery in NYC in 2000. He is a Jazz musician who, to date, has released 3 CDs. For the film, A Perfect Murder, where he played an artist, he actually painted the murals for his character's art studio.