THE FIRST...

• First year that members of the American Communist Party were denied their right to receive an Academy Award: 1958.
• First Academy Award nomination for a black actor: 1959. Sidney Poitier for The Defiant Ones.
• First actor to win an Oscar for playing an Oscar-winner: 2004. Cate Blanchet for playing Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator.
• First American woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director: 2003. Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation.
• First male African-America to win an Academy Award for Best Actor: 2001. Denzel Washington for Training Day. If you're thinking this is a mistake, then you should know that the first black male to win a Best Actor Oscar, Sidney Poitier, was born either in the Bahamas, or on the high seas on his way to Florida, depending upon which story you believe.
• First movie to be released on video before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture: 1991. Silence of the Lambs.
• First Irish movie to be nominated for Best Picture: 1989. My Left Foot.
• First year in which none of the nominees for Best Picture were American: 1987. (Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Lasse Hallstrom, Norman Jewison, Adrian Lyne.)
• First year in which every single nominee for both Best Actor and Best Actress were from America: 1985.
• First woman to ever receive and Academy Award nomination for Best Director: 1976. Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties.
• First (and only) X-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Movie: 1969. Midnight Cowboy.
• First movie for which the entire cast received acting nominations: 1966. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
• First year in which all winners in the acting categories were non-Americans: 1964. (Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Peter Ustinov, and Lila Kedrova.)
• First actor to receive two acting nominations after his death: James Dean.
• First Best Picture winner to also win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival: 1955. Marty.
• First foreign (not foreign-language) movie to received Academy Award for Best Picture: 1948. Hamlet.
• First B-movie to be nominated for Best Picture: 1947. Crossfire.
• First person to received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay: 1941. Orson Welles for, what else, Citizen Kane.
• First person to ever receive an Oscar posthumously: 1939. Sidney Howard, winner of Best Screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
• First foreign-language film to ever receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture: 1938. Grand Illusion.
• First person to be nominated for in both acting categories in a single year: 1938. Fay Bainter.
• First actor to win back to back actors: 1936-1937. Luise Rainer, winning for The Ziegfield Follies and The Good Earth.
• First movie to win Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Director: 1934. It Happened One Night.
• First Academy Award tie: 1931. Fredric March and Wallace Beery, Best Actor. Actually, it wasn't really a tie. Fredric March should be considered the real winner for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the rules at the time were such that a one vote differential in the voting would be counted as a tie. March had beaten Beery by exactly one vote, but Beery was also awarded a statuette nonetheless.