This Sunday marks the highlight of the Hollywood calendar, when the great and the good of the movie world gather for the world’s oldest entertainment awards ceremony – the Oscars.
This year’s Best Picture award is tipped to be a faceoff between dark comedy Birdman and the ground-breaking, 12-years in the making Boyhood.
Elsewhere, Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and Julianne Moore’s powerhouse turn in Still Alice appear to be the hot tips for the Best Actor and Best Actress gongs.
But enough of conventional movie achievements - we here at Guinness World Records would today like to shine a light on some slightly less heralded celluloid feats that are no less incredible. So here we bring you our alternative Academy Awards…
Youngest Film Director
From Shirley Temple to Macaulay Culkin, Hollywood has seen its fair share of precociously talented youngsters that have made a name for themselves in front of the camera.
But how about behind it?
Nepal’s Saugat Bista, pictured above, was just 7 years and 340 days old when he sat in the director’s chair to helm the movie Love You Baba which was released in Nepalese cinemas on 12 December 2014.
Kiran Shah (UK) (b. 28 September 1956) is the shortest professional stuntman currently working in films, standing 1 m 26.3 cm (4ft 1.7 in) when measured on 20 October 2003.
Having appeared in 52 movies since 1976, he has performed stunts in 31 of them, including being perspective stunt-double for Christopher Reeve (USA) in Superman (UK 1978) and Superman II (UK 1980) and more recently Elijah Wood (USA) in The Lord of the Rings (NZ/USA 2001 - 2003) trilogy.
A member of the British Equity Stunt Register, his career began when stunt arranger Bob Anderson (UK) asked him to stand in for a nine year old for the film Candleshoe (UK/USA 1977) starring David Niven (UK).
Most Swearing in one film
One of last year’s Oscar nominees, The Wolf of Wall Street, made a slightly less celebrated piece of movie history after the Martin Scorsese-directed film set a new benchmark for most swearing in one film.
The same f-word expletive is used 506 times – an average of 2.81 times per minute, during the biopic about Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio.
However, the record was beaten just eight months later with the release of Canadian gross-out comedy Swearnet. Made by the team behind cult sitcom Trailer Park Boys, the film racks up an impressively potty-mouthed 868 expletives.
Most money lost by a film
Disney’s sci-fi epic John Carter, which cost an estimated $250 million (£155 million) to make and a further $100 million (£62 million) to promote, grossed a total of $184 million (£114 million) following its worldwide release on 9 March 2012.
The studio admitted to having lost $200 million (£124 million) on the project by the end of March, making the film the biggest flop of all time.
Longest title of a film to win an Oscar for best picture
If the name of the trilogy to which it belongs is included, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (USA/New Zealand/Germany, 2003), directed by Peter Jackson (New Zealand), is the longest film title of any movie to win a Best Picture Academy Award, at 36 characters. It picked up the Best Picture Oscar at the 2004 Academy Awards ceremony in the Kodiak Theater, Los Angeles, California, USA on 29 February 2004.
If the title of this trilogy is excluded, the record is held by Around The World in Eighty Days (USA, 1956), directed by Michael Anderson (UK), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (USA, 1975), directed by Milos Forman (Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic). Both titles feature 26 characters and won their Oscars in the 1957 and 1976 ceremonies, respectively.
Most stunts by a living actor
Actors will often talk about how much they have suffered for their craft, but few will be able to match the injuries sustained by action film legend and all-round daredevil Jackie Chan.
Chan holds the record for most stunts by a living actor, having put his body on the line in more than 100 movies since 1972.
So far his injuries have included breaking his nose three times, both cheekbones, most of his fingers and his skull.
No insurance company will underwrite Chan's productions, in which he performs all his own stunts. After a number of stuntmen were injured during the making of Police Story, the star formed the Jackie Chan Stuntmen Association, training the stuntmen personally and paying for their medical bills out of his own pocket.
The star recently also chalked up the world record for most credits in one movie, after notching up a total of 15 credits for the movie Chinese Zodiac (writer, director, actor, producer, executive producer, cinematographer, art director, unit production manager, catering coordinator, stuntman, stunt coordinator, gaffer, composer, props, and theme tune vocalist).
Most costumes used in a film
The largest number of costumes used for any one film was 32,000 for the 1951 ancient Roman epic Quo Vadis.
More than 52,400 yards of material, most of it specially woven, was used for the thousands of period-correct outfits. These consisted of more than 15,000 sandals (all hand-sewn), 13,000 items of jewellery, 4,000 helmets of brass, aluminium and tin, 4,000 breastplates, 2,000 shields and 21,700 water bottles.
Lowest-budget movie to make $1 million at the US box office
The lowest-budget movie to make $1 million at the US box office is Robert Rodriguez’s (USA) El Mariachi (Mexico/USA, 1992). With a stated production budget of only $7,000, this self-financed, self-produced film went on to make a total of $2,041,928 in cinemas worldwide after it was picked up for distribution by Columbia Pictures.
Most Oscar nominations without winning
Spare a thought for mixer Kevin O'Connell (USA), who has received an impressive 20 Oscar nominations for sound starting with Terms of Endearment (USA 1983) in 1984, but has never won.
Here’s Kevin talking in 2007, back when he’d been snubbed just 18 times.
Most common sound effect in films
For the 1951 movie Distant Drums, a series of six short sound recordings was made in post-production to accompany the visuals of a soldier being bitten by an alligator and dragged into a stream.
The scream effect was archived by Warner Bros. and used exclusively by the studio in a series of movies, including Them! (USA 1954), The Sea Chase (USA 1955) and A Star is Born (USA 1954) before being picked up by sound effects editor Ben Burtt (USA). Burtt dubbed it the "Wilhelm Scream", after the character in the original movie, and used it in, among others, Star Wars (USA 1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (USA 1981).
Since then, the scream has been adopted by countless sound engineers and used in films such as Batman Returns (USA,UK 1992), Planet of the Apes (USA 2001), Madagascar (USA 2005) and, most recently, Norbit (USA 2007). To date, it has featured in at least 133 movies, as well as in computer games and themepark rides.
