LIMITED EDITION: "Toy Story 3," which is up for five Academy Awards, is only the third animated feature film to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture. "Beauty and the Beast," nominated in 1991, was the first, and "Up," nominated last year, was the second. "Beauty and the Beast" and "WALL-E" are tied as the animated films with the most Oscar nods at six.
SECOND TIME AROUND: Jeff Bridges ("True Grit"), Colin Firth ("The King's Speech") and Jeremy Renner ("The Town") are nominated in acting categories at the Oscars for the second year in a row, while previous acting winners Bridges, Javier Bardem ("Biutiful") Geoffrey Rush ("The King's Speech") and Nicole Kidman ("Rabbit Hole") are up for another trophy.
GOOD HAIR DAY: If four-time Oscar-winning songwriter Alan Menken wins with collaborator Glenn Slater for their soaring duet "I See the Light" from "Tangled," Menken would also score the record for the most wins in the original song category, surpassing Sammy Cahn, Johnny Mercer and James Van Heusen, who are each tied with four original song Oscar trophies.
SALES STORY: This year's 10 best picture nominees have taken home $1.1 billion at the box office. Nearly $415 million of that comes from the animated blockbuster "Toy Story 3," with two other nominees also cracking the $100-million earnings mark: "Inception" and "True Grit." It's not quite in the realm of last year's nominees, led by "Avatar" with $1.5 billion.
BARDEM'S SPEECH: Javier Bardem would be the sixth performer to win an Oscar for a role using a foreign language if he wins as best actor for "Biutiful." The previous winners are Italian speakers Sophia Loren ("Two Women"), Robert De Niro, ("The Godfather, Part II") and Roberto Benigni ("Life is Beautiful"), Spanish speaker Benicio Del Toro ("Traffic"), and French speaker Marion Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose").
