HOW TO USE THE ACADEMY AWARDS DATABASE

Choosing a Search Screen

There are two search screens to choose from: Basic and Advanced. The Basic screen allows searching on the five main components of Academy Award data: film title, nominee, award category, award year and song title. The Advanced screen expands the capabilities of the Basic by providing additional searchable fields, indexes and delimiters, and allowing the creation of more complex searches with the use of Boolean operators. In addition to database seaches, there are over forty documents of Academy Award statistics you can browse.

Select the desired search screen or browse statistics by clicking on the appropriate tab button. (For help with creating searches, see the Searching section.)

Selecting a Display Screen

There are six basic display screens. Results may be viewed by film title, nominee or award category with either an alphabetical or chronological primary sort. Additional displays are by film distributor and credited film director.

From the Basic search screen, the database will select a display for you based upon the field(s) being searched (this choice will be indicated in the Display Results Window after you move the cursor out of the search field). You do not need to make a selection yourself unless you want to override the default. To manually choose a display (from any search screen), make a selection from the drop-down list in the Display Results Window before executing your search.

Note: All records do not display in all display screens (e.g. most sci/tech and honorary awards will not be viewable in the film title displays because they are not associated with a film title). Also, "bonus fields," such as production company, distributor or award type, are viewable only in certain displays. (See Display Screens for detailed descriptions of the various displays.)

Viewing Search Results

When viewing your results from any display screen you will always have the option to select a different display screen from the Change View drop-down list, modify your last search, begin a new search, or click on hypertext links to perform simple, related searches.

Hypertext links appear in color when you "mouse over" the data element. There are four types of hypertext searches: Clicking on an awards year will bring up all nominations and awards for that year; clicking on the film title will bring up all nominations for that title; clicking on the award category will display all nominations for that category for that year (if you want all nominations for the entire category, you will need to perform a new search); and clicking on either the nomination statement or award citation will bring up all nominations for each nominee listed within the statement. To return to your original search results use the "back" button on your web browser.

Printing Search Results

To print displayed results, use the onscreen print button at the top of the page.