Night of the Johns Trivia Quiz

Answer: 1935, 1940, 1941 and 1952

John Ford was the only 20th century director to win four Academy Awards in this category. He was recognized for his work on "The Informer" (1935), "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940), "How Green Was My Valley" (1941), and also won Best Motion Picture) and "The Quiet Man" (1952).

The Best Director award was also won by three other Johns - John Huston in 1948 ("The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), John Schlesinger in 1969 ("Midnight Cowboy") and John G. Avildsen in 1976 ("Rocky"), but none of these options would allow for an all-John lineup in this quiz.

Answer: 1969 (42nd)

Unlike for directors, I did not have much of a choice for Best Actor Johns: The only actual John to have won this award in the first 90 years was John Wayne, for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in 1969's "True Grit". With twenty years, Wayne had one of the longest waits between his first Oscar nomination (for 1949's "Sands of Iwo Jima") and actually winning the award.

Of course you could nitpick this choice because John Wayne was just a stage name - his birth name was Marion Robert Morrison. In that case, the closest choice would have been Jon Voight, who received the award for 1978's "Coming Home".

Answer: 1981 (54th)

Among the eligible Johns for this category, I picked the only one to actually have John as a (second) birth name: British stage and movie veteran Sir (Arthur) John Gielgud who received the award for his portrayal of the valet Hobson in 1981's comedy "Arthur". Gielgud was a talent in all forms of entertainment and in 1991 became the fourth person to have won an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony (as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award).

Answer: 1975 (48th)

John Alcott won the 1975 Best Cinematography for his work on Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon", just one of many co-operations of these two cinematic greats. Alcott was first promoted to lighting cameraman (an older term for what is today called director of photography) during the later stages of the production of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and from there, remained Kubrick's primary cinematographer until 1980's "The Shining".

Answer: 1987 (60th)

John Patrick Shanley won this coveted award with his first original screenplay for a motion picture, "Moonstruck", a film that also earned acting awards for Cher and Olympia Dukakis. Shanley is also a prolific playwright and has won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for his 2004 stage work "Doubt: A Parable", later adapted into a movie that Shanley directed himself.

Answer: 1975, 1977, 1982 and 1993

The second four-time winner on this list is John Williams who received his "Best Original Score" Academy Awards for "Jaws" (1975), "Star Wars" (1977), "E.T." (1982) and "Schindler's List" (1993). Williams also won an Academy Award for Best Score Adaptation with his work on 1971's "Fiddler on the Roof" and has been nominated for more than 40 other scores, making him the person with the second most Academy Award nominations after Walt Disney.

Answer: 1967 (40th)

John Truscott won both Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction (the latter shared with Edward Carrere and set designer John W. Brown) for his work on "Camelot", an epic musical adaptation of the Arthurian legend. While he is counted among the most talented movie designers ever, he was also known for needing very high budgets, ultimately limiting his design career to just two films before he turned to acting and building interior design.

Answer: 1965 and 1977 (38th and 50th)

The Best Visual Effects Academy Award is very rarely awarded to just one person (the last such award was in 1969, to Stanley Kubrick), but John Stears received the 1965 Oscar alone for his groundbreaking work on the "James Bond" movie "Thunderball", the fourth in the series and the first to be shot on a large budget (more than the previous three films combined). Many of the advanced gadgets in the film, including Bond's rocket belt, actually worked and were filmed in real action instead of merely simulated.

Stears' second Academy Award was shared with four other men for 1977's "Star Wars: A New Hope", for which he designed and built the two famous droids C-3PO and R2D2 as well as the lightsabers and the Death Star.

Answer: 2018 (91st)

Out of the three possible Johns in this category, I have chosen John Ottman's win for editing the 2018 biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" which is unusual in that film editing is not actually his primary career - Ottman's main occupation is that of a composer with over 40 feature film scores to his name as opposed to just about a dozen editor credits. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was notoriously difficult to edit because of a change in director about two thirds through principal photography, which caused numerous continuity problems that even Oscar-worthy editing could not completely eliminate.

Answer: 1990 (63rd)

The winner was John Caglione Jr., sharing the award with Doug Drexler.

While 1990s "Dick Tracy" did not win any awards in the major categories, it did also score for Best Original Song ("Sooner or Later" written by Stephen Sondheim and performed by Madonna) and Best Art Direction. Caglione was nominated for a second Academy Award in 2008, again for his makeup work in a comic book adaptation, "The Dark Knight".