awards

The Victoria Cross has only been awarded 15 times since the end of World War 2

A British paratrooper was awarded the highest British military honor Thursday for his actions during a firefight in 2013 in Afghanistan.

Lance Corporal Joshua Leakey, 27, is only the third serviceman to receive the Victoria Cross for service in Afghanistan and the fifteenth since World War 2, according to the BBC.

Leakey was with a group of British and American troops who were pinned down on the side of a hill in Helmand province by about 20 insurgents. During the Taliban attack, he ran through heavy fire multiple times to assess the situation, assist the wounded U.S. Marine Captain, and fire on the enemy, ultimately helping the troops regain the initiative. During the battle, 11 Taliban were killed and four were wounded.

The 79-year-old star was 'deeply honored' by the Oscars tribute performance

Lady Gaga had already won the Oscars. Now it turns out she has won at life: Julie Andrews is a Little Monster.

“I was deeply honored by the Academy’s lovely tribute to The Sound of Music,” the film’s Oscar-winning star told PEOPLE about Gaga’s show-stopper, which became the night’s most-shared moment on social media, “and especially touched by Lady Gaga’s wonderful performance.”

The legendary 79-year-old star, who inspired a collective round of reverential “awww”s in the lobby of the Dolby Theatre when she took the stage at Sunday night’s show, then added the best spoonful of sugar imaginable.

“I have always been a fan, but last night we bonded and now I have a new friend,” said the star and noted children’s book author.

Even raindrops on roses can’t compete with that.

This article originally appeared on People.com.

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Did Joan Rivers get snubbed?

Even as the Oscars hangover subsides, some film fans are still worked up about one particular snub — and this time it’s not a nominee. Rather, it’s the fact that the annual ‘In Memoriam’ montage reel failed to include Joan Rivers. The late legend’s exclusion from the reel led to angry reactions, full of the indignation that Rivers herself so often used to comedic effect.

An Academy spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that yes, Rivers was one of the many people who must be left out in any given year, but that she was included in a remembrance gallery on the Oscars website. However, Rivers (like Elaine Stritch, another comedian who was missed by many viewers) is also absent from the official Academy list of members who died in 2014. Though Rivers, who was better known for her TV work than for film roles, had plenty of big-screen credits, from Space Balls to The Smurfs, Academy membership is not automatic, so it’s entirely possible that she was not part of the group; there is no official, public list of members.

Still, an in-depth 2013 investigation by the New York Times into what goes into the making of the Oscars memorial reel — which has been a feature of the telecast since 1994 — revealed that inclusion or exclusion from the montage is not so simple as “members in, non-members out.”

For one thing, non-members are eligible for inclusion, though positive involvement with the organization always helps. (Some conspiracy theorists guessed that Rivers’ acid tongue on the red carpet might have tipped the scales against her.) For another, it’s clear that, though the committee that makes the calls is anonymous, even death isn’t the end of the Hollywood publicity race. Attempting to get a client onto that list can be the last act of PR goodwill for many a publicist.

In fact, that publicity race suggests one possible reason for the exclusion of a major name like Rivers or Stritch. The family and friends of a lesser-known Academy member may push hard to get their loved one on the memorial list, but those who speak for the most famous of the dead are less likely to think a campaign is necessary. It’s only on Oscars night that they learn the extra push might have helped.

Read next: Joan Rivers’ Daughter Writes a Book About Her Life

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Stellar performances from John Legend, Lady Gaga and others injected excitement into an often moribund show

It’s not as if the Oscars didn’t have material to work with. In many ways, 2014 was an interesting and vital year in movies — not just artistically, but in terms of engaging viewers and giving them things to talk about. The end of the year in particular saw movies like American Sniper, Selma — even The Interview — that spurred conversations and controversies and reminded us that movies can have effects beyond their running times. (The same was true of the nominations and omissions.)

The 2015 Oscars broadcast, though, had a hard time capturing that excitement — or anything else. It certainly had a big enough net: the show was 3 hours and 40 minutes long. But as a TV broadcast, it struggled not just with length but tone, trying alternately to be light entertainment and a meaningful statement. Sometimes it was delightfully one, sometimes it was affectingly the other. But often the two collided painfully.

There were high hopes from the beginning, because of host Neil Patrick Harris, generally a delightful stage performer who’s done a reliably terrific job hosting the Tony Awards. And he started off in fine form. His first joke immediately addressed the white elephant in the room: the dearth of minority nominees for this year’s awards: “Tonight we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest — sorry, brightest.” Then he ditched a traditional monologue to do his thing: musical comedy, a rapid-fire, playful celebration of “moving pictures” that was both sweet and funny: “Check out the glamor and glitter/ People tweeting on the Twitter / And no one’s drunk and bitter yet ’cause no one’s lost.”

Sometimes, though, the organism that is the Oscars is bigger than the host, and Harris seemed to lose his grip on it, thanks largely to some badly written material. Several jokes razzing celebs in the audience fell flat, including one that involved getting Selma star David Oyelowo to trash the remake of Annie, which Oyelowo reacted to with a memorable “meh” gesture.

Harris is nothing if not game, but he often seemed disconnected from the limp material. He followed up one winner’s story of her son’s suicide with a dissonant joke about the puffy orbs on her gown: “Takes a lot of balls to wear a dress like that!” (though it’s not clear if he caught the suicide reference before making the joke). But when he had the chance, he rallied, romping through the wings onto the stage in his tighty-whities in a bit that recalled Oscar winner Birdman, and reviving when he had the right material. (“Benedict Cumberbatch,” he said, was “the sound you get when you ask John Travolta to introduce Ben Affleck.”) But then there was the running gag, about Harris’ Oscar predictions having been locked in a box onstage, that ran so long and with so little payoff it could have been redeemed only if the box contained a $10 million check made out in my name.

When the scripted material falters, you hope for the unscripted moments to deliver, and the acceptance speeches often did. It was a year of earnestness, inspiration and exhortation. Patricia Arquette of Boyhood urged pay equality for women. Best Song winner John Legend insisted that “Selma is now, because the struggle for justice is right now.” Best Adapted Screenplay winner Graham Moore — for The Imitation Game, about British cryptography genius Alan Turing who was persecuted for being gay — recalled considering suicide at age 16, and offered hope to young people feeling the same way. “Stay weird,” he said. “Stay different.”

Fittingly for an Oscars that began with a song, it was often the music that salvaged this one. Tegan and Sara with The Lonely Island delivered a joyous, hallucinatory “Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie (the performers handing out Lego statuettes that several guests clutched through the ceremony). Lady Gaga performed an incendiary medley from The Sound of Music — seemed like a strange idea, but totally worked — ending with a salute from Julie Andrews, who pronounced “Lady Gaga” as though it were a royal title. And Legend’s performance of “Glory” with Common was the rare Oscar musical number that — with a recreation of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge — managed to reproduce the emotion of the movie onstage.

MORE Watch Common and John Legend Perform ‘Glory’ at the Oscars

But Selma was largely outside of the major Oscar running, as was the much-talked-about American Sniper. Much of the night involved jockeying between boutique films like Birdman, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel — which is no fault of the broadcast but may not have helped with mass viewer engagement. There was also a general lack of momentum to the night — exemplified by staid choices, like having the Best Animated Film nominees represented by still drawings, as opposed to something, well, animated.

In the end, this Oscars was neither brilliant or a disaster; like many Hollywood productions, it was just a long thing that felt put together by committee. There were moving moments and tedious moments — but there were also just tons and tons of moments (and yet, somehow, there wasn’t room in the In Memoriam reel for comedian, actress, writer-director and red-carpet fixture Joan Rivers).

That said, I’d be glad to see the very musical Harris get another shot at hosting the Academy Awards. And there’s nothing wrong with a telecast that plays up all the incredible music that gets written for the movies. But the music was never the problem. This year, it was the orchestration that left something to be desired.

Read next: The Oscars Were a Night of Mild Surprises, Including Neil Patrick Harris

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This year marks the 75th anniversary of 'the most memorable twelve months in the history of the American cinema'

No offense to Neil Patrick Harris or to this year’s best-picture nominees, but this year’s Oscars ceremony is also notable for something that proves it has no chance of being the best: this is the 75th anniversary of the Academy Awards ceremony that honored what is widely thought to be the best year in Hollywood history.

There’s not much of a public record of what happened at the 1940 ceremony between the giving-out of statuettes. It was the first such evenings hosted by Oscars-hosting champ Bob Hope, so presumably there were jokes, but it took place before the days of a national radio broadcast (much less a television broadcast) of the ceremony, though local radio stations may have broadcast a portion of the evening.

But we don’t have to know what Hope said to the audience there to know that it was epic. Here’s how TIME recounted the evening’s events, in the pages of the Mar. 11, 1940, issue:

Hollywood’s swank Cocoanut Grove was aflutter with ermine wraps and shimmering gowns as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made its twelfth annual awards. To Robert Donat for his role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and to Vivien Leigh for her Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind went Oscars signifying the year’s best performances by an actor and actress. Nobody was surprised. Academy selections of the best supporting actor and actress met with general approval: 1) Thomas Mitchell, for his whiskey-soaked doctor in Stagecoach; 2) Hattie McDaniel, for her sentimental performance as the hard-boiled mammy in Gone With the Wind. Cinemactress McDaniel was the first Negro to receive the prize. Posthumous were two awards: 1) to the late Douglas Fairbanks Sr. for international services to motion pictures; 2) to the late Playwright Sidney Howard for his Gone With the Wind script. Of the 17 major Oscars handed out, ten were copped by G.W.T.W. Producer David O. Selznick, pretty proud and getting richer by the minute, said he would send an extra check to Author Margaret Mitchell.

Winners from Gone With the Wind, however, aren’t the evidence that 1940’s Oscars were the best. For that, look to the losers.

The best picture nominees who weren’t good enough to take home an Oscar included some of the best movies ever: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Stagecoach;, The Wizard of Oz; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and Dark Victory, and that’s only a partial list, not to mention the famous movies (like Young Mr. Lincoln and Babes in Arms) that weren’t even nominated. Any year can have one instant classic; it’s a rare year that has dozens. That year had been a period that Gerald Clarke described in TIME, on its 50th anniversary in 1989, as “the most memorable twelve months in the history of the American cinema.” But, as Clarke explained, it took a while to realize what was going on: the theater was still seen as superior to the cinema, and the business-centric studio system was still in effect. Movies were low-culture fluff, and nobody was looking for history to be made. And yet, it was.

“There is no formula for magic, and what happened then is something of a mystery even today. Part of the explanation may be that the studio system, which had been born 20 years or so earlier, had come of age; it had reached its maturity but was still full of zest,” Clarke wrote. “The bosses may have been crude and often tyrannical, but they loved their business, they knew what they were doing, and they had created huge organizations whose only purpose was to send new pictures to thousands of theaters, most of which, in the U.S., were owned by the studios themselves. At the same time, moviemaking had reached a level of technical perfection that would have seemed miraculous even five years before.”

The night of the Academy Awards of 75 years ago was a celebration of that magic — but there is one way in which the 1940 Oscars flopped: as recounted by the Academy, the practice of tipping off newspapers in advance, to get the winners into the morning paper, backfired that year. The Los Angeles Times published the results in the evening edition rather than the morning edition, which meant the attendees already knew who had won.

Read the full 1939 cover story about Gone With the Wind, here in the TIME Vault: G With the W

Read Gerald Clarke’s examination of the best year in Hollywood history, here in the TIME Vault: Twelve Months of Magic

In 1958, Oscars host Bob Hope may have made comedy history

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

These days, an Oscars host is likely to wish only to avoid a complete disaster — but in 1958, veteran host Bob Hope may have introduced the world to a joke that, decades later, has become part of comedy’s common heritage.

Here’s how TIME described the ceremony in the Apr. 7 issue of that year:

As things got under way, Jimmy Stewart told the home audience that the uninterrupted program was “being brought to you in living black and white.” Bob Hope, back from his Russian junket, noted that there had been TV in all the rooms of his Moscow hotel—”only it watches you”—also called attention to the parades of expensive talent being given away free to television, proving that “the motion-picture industry isn’t frightened. It’s off its rocker.”

Comedy fans will likely recognize a very familiar construction in that first Hope joke. In Soviet Russia, the TV watches you!

These days, that construction is often known as the “Russian reversal.” Swap around the order in which things are usually done, add “in [Soviet] Russia” to the beginning, and that’s it. The joke has appeared on The Simpsons and Family Guy, and the Internet is flush with “t-shirt wears you” gear.

Most sources — from the spot-on Language Log blog at UPenn to the equally trustworthy (when it comes to viral jokes) Know Your Meme — trace the joke’s popularity to Yakov Smirnoff, a Russian-born comedian who came to the U.S. in the 1970s. And it’s not hard to see why he would get the credit:

Dig a little deeper, and some sources note that a similar joke (substituting “the Old Country” for “Russia”) appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which started airing in 1968 — which is, of course, a full decade after Bob Hope used the joke at the 1958 Oscars.

There’s some evidence that Hope’s joke was new at that time: LIFE magazine had a photographer on scene during rehearsals for the telecast, and — though the magazine ended up printing something different — the caption with one of the photos (seen here) indicates that Hope and friends were laughing at one of his “recently acquired Russian jokes.”

But, while Bob Hope may have introduced a national television audience to the Russian reversal, the real moral of the story is not that he was first — just that it’s hard to say who came up with something so common. After all, buried in the meme’s page on TVTropes.org there’s an example from a play written a full two decades earlier, before Bob Hope hosted the Oscars, before the Oscars were on TV, before the Cold War even started. In 1938’s Cole Porter musical Leave It to Me!, a man tries to tip a messenger. “No tipping,” he’s told. “In Soviet Russia, messenger tips you.”

Read the full write-up of the 1958 ceremony, here in the TIME Vault: The Oscars

The awards were first broadcast on TV in 1953. Bob Hope's advice that year? Watch the losers

It was, as TIME put it in 1953, a bit of a shotgun wedding: old-time Hollywood and his “child bride” television, as Bob Hope phrased it, had already effectively gotten together, and it was too late to go back. They made it official that year by introducing TV viewers to the Oscars, with the first-ever broadcast of the annual Hollywood ceremony.

The budget for the telecast of the 25th Academy Awards was a quarter of a million dollars, and veteran host Hope was chosen to MC the night from Los Angeles. And it was clear from the beginning that television would change things for the Academy Awards:

To the movie fans outside Hollywood’s RKO Pantages Theater, the show looked familiar: klieg lights crisscrossing the wet night sky and Cadillacs disgorging jeweled and ermined cargoes. But inside the palace, surrounded by TV cameras, zoomar lenses, floodlights and monitoring screens, the 2,800 top-drawer movie folk were acutely conscious that times had changed.

For the first time, some 34 million televiewers got a look at Hollywood’s most ballyhooed annual event. The TV technicians, bossing the whole show, did a slick job of switching back & forth between Hollywood and Manhattan’s International Theater, where a junior edition of the ceremonies was under way. All the cinema queens, some appearing for the first time on TV, looked as gorgeous as they ever did, but a few seemed to miss the careful direction they get in films. The cameras might have been less rigid (the losers in the audience were ignored, even though Bob Hope had advised watching them: “You’ll see great understanding, great sportsmanship—great acting”). But the show was still fascinating in an unrehearsed, star-studded way.

That first year, the presence of the cameras was perhaps the most notable effect of the televising of the Oscars. After all, movie fans had already been able to listen in on the radio, so the Oscars weren’t entirely new to them. Plus, TV didn’t get much respect at the time. Hope joked in his opening monologue that television was “where movies go when they die” and that some in Hollywood were reluctant to acknowledge it as a medium:

By the second year, about 40 million people tuned in — that’s not so far from the number for 2014 — and TIME commented that advertising to them was distracting from the actual ceremony. Already by 1957, the magazine complained that, “Any glamour that was left was promptly rubbed out by the split-second demands of television, which turned the parade of winners into a supermarket mob scene.” In just a few years, the small screen had pulled a Sunset Blvd.: the stars were still the same people, but they’d quickly gone from distant and magical to sadly normal, with a brief via “fascinating in an unrehearsed…way.” In the era of Seth MacFarlane regaling the at-home audience with a song about the anatomy of the industry’s most famous actresses, it’s clear that the progression away from that glamor didn’t stop.

The best picture award in 1953 went to The Greatest Show on Earth but the ceremony also introduced a new contender for “greatest show”: the broadcast was, according to the Academy, the most-watched show in commercial television history so far, and its effects are still being felt.

Read the full article from 1953 here, in the TIME Vault: The Oscars

The ceremony wasn't even known as the Oscars yet

It was May of 1929 when members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first gathered to fête their own. Decades later, the annual ceremony is the event for which the Academy is best-known — last year’s Oscars telecast was watched by tens of millions of people — but, back then, the occasion only merited a single paragraph of attention in the pages of TIME.

In the May 27, 1929, issue, as part of a round-up of the week’s news, TIME commented that:

Douglas Fairbanks, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presided in Los Angeles last week when the Academy’s annual prizes were awarded. Among the winners : Acting — Janet Gaynor (Seventh Heaven) ; Emil Jannings (The Way of All Flesh, The Last Command) ; Directing — Frank Borzage (Seventh Heaven) ; Engineering Effects — Roy Pomeroy (Wings) ; Outstanding Picture — Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. (Wings). Charles Chaplin was specially rewarded for being writer, actor, director, producer of The Circus.

Also on that printed page: John D. Rockefeller III had been voted “third most pious” by his Princeton class and a ground had been broken for a new Ford plant being built in England.

Observant movie buffs may note that Wings, the best-picture winner, actually came out in 1927. That’s because the first Oscars (not that they were called the Oscars back then; the nickname didn’t stick until the mid-1930s) took a while to put together, and though they took place in mid-1929 were honoring movies from the year that began in August of 1927.

Though the first Oscars were a star-studded affair, the event might not even be recognizable to today’s home viewers. For one thing, there were no home viewers — obviously, since television was barely being broadcast at all — and only a couple hundred people in the actual audience. Plus, though the ceremony came in May, the winners had already been announced a few months earlier. There were 12 categories: cinematography, actor, actress, art direction, two director categories (comedy and drama), effects, two best-picture categories (“outstanding picture” and “unique and artistic picture,” which went to the film Sunrise) and three writing categories (adaptation, original story and silent-movie title cards). Several of the winners were victorious for multiple movies; for example, actress Janet Gaynor’s performances in three separate films were honored with one award. By the next year, the number of categories had decreased, as directing, writing and best picture were each combined into a single race.

And, though TIME only commented on Charlie Chaplin’s special award, another special prize went to Warner Bros. for something that ended up changing the film industry forever: The Jazz Singer, the movie that showed the future was for “talkies.”

This year’s Oscars will take place on Sunday, Feb. 22.

The complete rundown for the 87th Academy Awards