Regardless of what happens on Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre, it’s likely that we’ll see a few landmark wins and some new Oscar records. Here are some of the notable ones that could happen:
• If 16 of the 62 nominated women win, this year’s Oscars will break the record set last year for the most female winners ever. (Three of those women — Scarlett Johansson, Cynthia Erivo and Emma Tillinger Koskoff — have two nominations each.)
• If “Parasite” wins in any of the six categories in which it is nominated, it’ll be the first Korean film ever to win in that category. (It’s already the first Korean film ever nominated in all of those categories — before this year, the only Korean nominees were two animated shorts, “Birthday Boy” and “Adam and Dog.”)
• If “Parasite” wins Best Picture, it’ll be the first non-English film to win that award.
•It will also be the first Palme d’Or winner from the Cannes Film Festival to take Best Picture since 1955’s “Marty,” the only previous film to score those two awards.
• If Bong Joon Ho wins Best Director for “Parasite,” he’ll be the second director of a non-English film to win — and also the second in a row, after Alfonso Cuaron for “Roma” last year.
• If Bong Joon Ho or Sam Mendes (“1917) wins Best Director, he’ll be the ninth non-American director to win in the last 10 years, the most in a single decade in Oscar history. (The previous high for non-American winners in a decade came in the ’60s, when two winners were Austrian and four were British.)
The previous winners this past decade were Tom Hooper (British) for “The King’s Speech,” Michel Hazanavicius (French) for “The Artist,” Ang Lee (Taiwanese) for “Life of Pi,” Alfonso Cuaron (Mexican) for “Gravity” and “Roma,” Alejandro González Iñárritu (Mexican) for “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” Damien Chazelle (American) for “La La Land” and Guillermo del Toro (Mexican) for “The Shape of Water.”
(NOTE: The Academy marks its shows by the year of the eligible movies, so this upcoming show is the 2019 Oscars, and the decade I’m talking about is the 2010-2019 Academy Awards.)
• If Bong Joon Ho wins Best Director, he’ll be the second Asian director to do so, after Ang Lee (who won twice, for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of Pi”).
• If “Parasite” wins in five of its six categories, it’ll beat “Fanny and Alexander” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to become the foreign-language film with the most Oscar wins.
• If Thelma Schoonmaker wins for editing “The Irishman,” she’ll set a new record for the most wins for film editing, four. (She’s currently tied with Michael Kahn at three.)
• If “1917” wins Best Picture, it’ll be the first film to win without an acting nomination since “Slumdog Millionaire” in 2009.
• It’ll also be the first film to win without acting or film editing nominations since “Grand Hotel” in 1932.
• If Sam Mendes wins Best Director for “1917,” he’ll set a new record for the longest gap between Oscar directing wins. He won 20 years ago for “American Beauty” and was not nominated again until this year. Billy Wilder currently holds the record with a 15-year gap between “The Lost Weekend” (1945) and “The Apartment” (1960).
• Mendes can also join Frank Borzage and Alfonso Cuarón as the only directors to win more than one Best Director award without ever losing.
• If Joaquin Phoenix wins Best Actor for “Joker,” he’ll be the second person to win an Oscar for playing the Joker, after Heath Ledger for “The Dark Knight.” This will tie the character of the Joker/Arthur Fleck with Vito Corleone as the only character to result in two Oscar wins. (Corleone’s wins were by Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” and Robert De Niro in “The Godfather Part II”).
• If Renée Zellweger wins for playing Judy Garland in “Judy,” she’ll be the second person to win an acting award for playing an Oscar winner. (The first was Cate Blanchett, who won for playing Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator.”) Judy Garland’s award was a Juvenile Oscar that she won at the 1939 Oscars for “The Wizard of Oz” and “Babes in Arms.”
• If Brad Pitt wins Best Supporting Actor for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” he’ll become the third person to win Oscars for acting and for producing a Best Picture winner. Pitt previously won the Best Picture award for 2013’s “12 Years a Slave.” Michael Douglas won the Best Picture award for producing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the Best Actor award for “Wall Street,” while George Clooney won Best Picture for “Argo” and Best Supporting Actor for “Syriana.”
• If Cynthia Erivo wins either Best Actress or Best Original Song for “Harriet,” she’ll become the 16th (and youngest) person to complete the Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony grand slam known as the EGOT. (Her Emmy is a Daytime Emmy rather than a Primetime one.) Erivo’s E, G and T all came from her performance in “The Color Purple” – on stage, on album and on “The Today Show.”
• If Greta Gerwig wins Best Adapted Screenplay for “Little Women,” she’ll become the first solo woman to win in the category since Emma Thompson for “Sense and Sensibility” in 1995, and the first solo woman to win in any writing category since Diablo Cody for “Juno” in 2007.
• If “Little Women” wins Best Picture, Amy Pascal will be the first woman in history to win the award by herself and not share it with a male colleague.
• If Hildur Guðnadóttir wins Best Original Score for “Joker,” she’ll become the third female composer to win an award for scoring, after Rachel Portman for “Emma” and Anne Dudley for “The Full Monty.” (Marilyn Bergman won in the Original Song Score category in 1983 for “Yentl,” but she wrote songs, not score, for that film.)
• If “Jojo Rabbit” wins Best Costume Design, Mayes C. Rubeo will become the first Hispanic winner in that category. (She’s already the first Hispanic nominee.)
• If “Toy Story 4” wins Best Animated Feature, it will mean Pixar has won more awards in that category than all other studios combined. Currently, Pixar has 9 wins and everybody else has 9 — Disney with 3 and DreamWorks, Paramount, Aardman, Sony, WB and Studio Ghibli with 1 each.
• If “Toy Story 4” doesn’t win, it’ll be only the fourth loss in 13 nominations for Pixar, and first time ever that two consecutive Pixar nominees lost. (“Incredibles 2” lost to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” last year.)
• If “Missing Link” wins Best Animated Feature, it’ll be Laika’s first win in 5 nominations, one for each film the company has made: “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” “The Boxtrolls,” “Kubo & the Two Strings” and “Missing Link.”
• If “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” wins Best Animated Feature, it’ll be the first win for DreamWorks Animation since “Shrek” in 2002, the first year the category existed.
• If “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” wins anything, it’ll be the first wins for the “Star Wars” franchise since the original trilogy. (“Star Wars” won seven, “The Empire Strikes Back” won two and “Return of the Jedi” won one.)
• If “The Irishman” wins six of its 10 nominations, it will set a new record for Oscars for a film directed by Martin Scorsese. The previous high of five wins is shared by “The Aviator” and “Hugo.”
• If “The Irishman” goes 0-for-10, Scorsese will be the first director to have two films hit double digits in nominations without a single win. His film “Gangs of New York” went 0-for-10, joining the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” and David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” in that category. The record for futility is 0-for-11, set by Herb Ross’ “The Turning Point” and tied by Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple.”
• If “In the Absence” wins for Best Documentary Short, it’ll be the first Korean film to win in that category.
• If “Hair Love” wins Best Animated Short, former NFL player Matthew A. Cherry will become the second professional athlete to win an Oscar, after Kobe Bryant did so two years ago in the same category.