Oscars by the numbers

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has received 11 Academy Award nominations - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (adaptation), Film Editing, Visual Effects, Costume Design, Art Direction, Makeup, Sound Mixing, Original Song, and Original Score.

The most nominations received by a film is 14, for All About Eve, in 1950, and Titanic, in 1997. A raft of films have had the nod in 13 categories, including Gone With The Wind (1939), Mary Poppins (1964), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and Chicago (2002).

Ben Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997) both won 11 Academy Awards, with West Side Story the runner-up in 1961 with 10.

Peter Jackson, with four nominations under his belt, has a way to go to equal Walt Disney's record. The master movie-maker won 26 Oscars, 22 of them competitive awards and four honorary awards. And that was from a total of 59 nominations.

The chances are only even that ROTK will win something - two films had 11 nominations without winning, The Turning Point in 1977 and The Color Purple in 1985.