Oscar how long

PT on March 27, The Oscar nominations will be announced on February 8, There are no nominees just yet for the 94th Oscars, but films released between March 1, , and December 31, , are eligible for consideration.

For more speculation about Oscar predictions , check out the Gold Derby odds. There is no host for the Oscars just yet. This year, the Academy Awards once again went without an emcee but the ceremony opened with former winner Regina King setting the table for the unconventional show.

Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean, won seven Oscars, matching the success five years earlier of another Lean epic, the minute The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Lawrence of Arabia actually took longer to make than the events of World War One depicted in it. It is Spielberg's longest film. A recent trend toward shorter Best Picture winners, however, suggests this may at least be as favourable a time as any in Oscars history for a small but perfectly formed film such as Gravity. In the s, a Best Picture average running time beyond two-and-a-half hours made it the most bottom-numbing decade in Oscars history, with winners including historical epics such as Braveheart and The English Patient.

And if you thought those two were long, they were not even among the three longest Best Pictures in a decade when there were also wins for Schindler's List minutes , Titanic minutes and Dances with Wolves minutes. Since those bloated Nineties days, however, Best Picture winners have been getting in shape and shedding minutes. In the Noughties, there were three Best Picture winners of two hours or under - the first time that had happened since the Seventies.

Then in this decade so far, all three winners - The King's Speech, The Artist and Argo - have been relatively small-scale films of two hours or under. This year's longest Best Picture nominee is the three-hour The Wolf of Wall Street, from Martin Scorsese, the veteran director whose acclaimed body of work is notable also for its steadily climbing running times. Even within its restricted running time, with its universal themes of grief, recovery and survival as well as a visual scale that literally takes in the whole world, Gravity manages much that the academy usually finds so persuasive.

Dobbins, arguing that the film is "just as important as something 80 minutes longer", says: "As a time-limit enthusiast, I am still rooting for Gravity, which proves that epic movies do not need to go on for ever and ever.

After the brief but brutal struggle that Gravity puts Sandra Bullock's lead character through, the film now faces its own battle against the odds - having delivered one triumphant ending already, can the movie manage another come Oscars night?

Cleopatra also managed to snag Oscars for photography, art direction in colour, costume design Miss Taylor in a bath towel , and special effects Taylor v Burton. Long journey to an Oscar for Sidney Poitier — archive. Photograph: AP.