What happens when you pack an auditorium full of attention whores…er, I mean actors? Oscar Night! The stars are all dying to shine at Hollywood’s biggest award night and the lengths they’ll go to to get some applause always make it worth watching! So, let’s take a tour of Crazy Tinseltown with the Top 10 Most Outrageous Oscar Moments!

Saturday

This Sunday is the 81st Academy Awards and, let’s face it, after the red carpet action (a fashion lover’s porn), and the initial few big awards are given out, the show gets way boring for about two hours. What to do? Play The Frisky’s Oscar Bingo! Click here to print the bingo card…

Taraji P. Henson is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queenie in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” but do you know anything else about her? Keep reading for some fascinating trivia about the 38-year-old D.C. native that will impress your friends when you’re watching the Academy Awards this Sunday night.

Gus Van Sant’s biopic “Milk” is nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but writer Dustin Lance Black drew heavily on “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Randy Shilts’ 1982 biography of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official, played onscreen by the fiery Sean Penn.

Something that sets this movie apart from the pack of plain old biopics is its use of actual archival and documentary footage. But Black also took some liberties with the story—here’s a rundown, so you don’t get caught revising Wikipedia with “facts” from the movie that are as real as Bernie Madoff’s money.

Anyone can see the movie; only smarties read the book. This year all five nominees for Best Picture are stolen from based on literary sources. We’re giving you a cheat sheet to all of Hollywood’s hippest reads.

“The Reader,”  by Bernard Schlink (1995) is a former Oprah-fave. Now it’s an Oscar-nommed movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet in her Golden Globe-winning role as a German streetcar conductor who has nasty secrets and a penchant for teenage boys.

Maria Pinto, the Chicago designer who has dressed Michelle Obama on many occasions, is among seven up-and-coming designers competing to have their gowns worn onstage at this year’s Academy Awards. Pinto’s platinum-hued jacquard strapless gown is in keeping with the Old Hollywood theme of the night, which all the “Designer Challenge” contestants seem to have adopted. The winning gown, chosen by the public, will be worn by an award escort. To check out the other designers’ gowns, visit Oscar.com.

The Academy Awards are less than two weeks away, and with that, and Black History Month in mind, we want to remember Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel was an established radio and film actress before she played Mammy in “Gone with the Wind,” but it was this role that made her career and cemented her as a film legend. Her endearing comedy and ability to scold and scoff her white charges earned her a Best Supporting Actress Award, the first given to a black actor. She was also the first black actor to attend the Academy Awards banquet.

Ironically, however, segregation laws prevented her from attending the Atlanta premiere of “Gone with the Wind” on December 15, 1939. And she, like the other black actors, were excluded from the souvenir program. Producer David O. Selznick attempted to bring McDaniel to the premiere, but MGM cautioned against it because Georgia’s segregation laws would have required her to stay in a “blacks only” hotel and she would have had to sit in a segregated part of the theater away from her fellow actors. Clark Gable (Rhett Butler), who McDaniel had befriended while working on another movie, threatened to boycott the premiere unless she was allowed to attend, but she urged him to go anyway. She did, however, attend the Hollywood debut, and her photo was featured in the program upon Selznick’s insistence. Although, McDaniel received the highest recognition for an actor, her career was not without criticism…

Anyone can see the movie; only smarties read the book. This year all five nominees for Best Picture are stolen from based on literary sources. We’re giving you a cheat sheet to all of Hollywood’s hippest reads.

First up is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Based on a 1921 F. Scott Fitzgerald story, it snapped up a whopping 13 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brad Pitt, as a man born old who gets younger each day. Pitt took the “go-ugly” requirement for Oscar Gravitas (see: Charlize Theron, “Monster”) to a new level.

The original story is 26 pages, so director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth had to add stuff so the movie wouldn’t be, like, 26 minutes. After the jump, a rundown of the movie versus the book…

“[Young women] look at all of us, myself included, on these magazine covers and they think, ‘my God, how does she get skin like that?’ And I can tell you, I have so many blemishes under this makeup that have been so fabulously covered. I promise you. I promise you.

But I did realize a few years ago that no one actually talks about this retouching thing. It’s like a secret or something. I’m damned if it’s going to be a secret anymore. I really want these young women to know we don’t look like this.” —the gorgeous Kate Winslet to ABC News

Anyone can see the movie—only smarties read the book. This year, all five nominees for Best Picture are stolen from based on literary sources. We’re giving you a cheat sheet to all of Hollywood’s hippest reads. “Slumdog Millionaire” scored 10 Oscar nods, which means we’re going to get to see M.I.A. wear something insane when she performs her nominated song, “O Saya,” on February 22. The movie focuses on Jamal, a chai-wallah, or tea boy, who wins the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” The story is based on Vikas Swarup’s Indian bestseller Q&A. However, more than the title has been changed. After the jump, how director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufroy fiddled with the original ...

Anna Paquin has been steaming up the small screen with her role as Sookie Stackhouse on HBO’s “True Blood”. But we realized we know very little about this actress, except that she starred opposite Holly Hunter in “The Piano” at age nine and took on the role of Rogue in the “X-Men” franchise as a teen. That’s quite an expanse of time and we knew she had to have been up to something. You know, keeping her name out there. So after the jump find out how Paquin spends her time and who she spends it with.

Stripper turned Academy Award-winning “Juno” screenwriter Diablo Cody has returned to ranting on her MySpace page, and this one’s a doozy. After she climbed out of Midwestern obscurity to win an Oscar, work with Spielberg, and garner the attention of the international media, the former blogger found herself a target for those who didn’t appreciate her writing abilities, her pole dancing skills, or her ascent to the top of the Hollywood pile. 

We’ve been thinkin’ about hookers lately, after last week’s poll and our new obsession with Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. After researching ladies of the night in films and TV, we’ve noticed an interesting trend—pricey call girls are incredibly fashionable, as Secret Diary suggested, but news that Darren Star would be producing an HBO based on Diary Of A Manhattan Call Girl proves it. Play a hooker in a relatively “serious” movie, and guess what? Oscar is the only man you’ll take home! (Your chances are even better if the director is Woody Allen.) After the jump we break it down with the help of a fun timeline of sex workers on TV and in the movies.

I have a total thing for Daniel Day-Lewis. Yes, he has questionable style. But he’s also possibly the most amazing actor ever, which is especially impressive considering he left acting for a few years to become a cobbler in Italy. Did you know that? So cool.  He’s sexy and manly, but obviously very much in touch with his feminine side, which explains the piercings in both ears and the somewhat fey use of scarves. Most of all, he seems like a really nice, genuine, unpretentious guy, which is rare amongst the best actors (look at Russell Crowe!). After the jump, a video from the press room interviews after the Academy Awards on Sunday, where Day-Lewis explains why he smooched George Clooney after winning and gives his impression of the rampant cult usage of his “I drink your milkshake, I drink it up”-line from There Will Be Blood. Which reminds me—the guy totally has a great sense of humor.

Besides the opening monologue, the best part about the Academy Awards is the musical performances. My all-time favorite was Three 6 Mafia doing “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp,” from Hustle and Flow. Looking at this cool graphic, it seems like there might be a method for winning an Oscar for Best Song—including the words “love,” “heart,” dance,” or “remember” in your lyrics seems to help. (There are definitely exceptions, like the aforementioned tune.) Out of this year’s nominees, we’re rooting for “Falling Slowly” from Once, despite the fact that it contains none of these words. [Entertainment Weekly]

We finally saw No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers’ movie thatjust got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. It was a fantastic film due in part to the tremendous performance by Javier Bardem, who just scored a Best Supporting Actor nod, who plays the film’s psychotic villain, Anton Chigurh. Suffice it to say, he scared the pants of us, and not in a good way—but how quickly we forgot his character’s terrifying haircut when we started looking at pictures of him in real life. Ay carumba! Talk about smoldering. Penelope Cruz, his rumored girlfriend, is one lucky lady—she should just run like hell if he ever asks her to pick heads or tails. [IMDB]