At the first Academy Awards in 1929, the Academy actually altered the vote for Best Actor and didn’t give it to the leading vote-getter. The reason? They voted for Rin-Tin-Tin (yes, the dog).

Rin-Tin-Tin was crazy prolific! He was in 11 films between 1928-1929. At the first Academy Awards in 1929, the Academy actually altered the vote for Best Actor and didn’t give it to the leading vote-getter. The reason? They voted for Rin-Tin-Tin (yes, the dog). He deserved that award. The New York Times had this to say about the strange story of the first ever Best Actor winner:

¨Can a dog deserve an Oscar? At the first Academy Awards, presented in 1929, the charismatic German shepherd who fought off gangs of villains in movies like “Clash of the Wolves” and “Jaws of Steel” won the vote count for best actor, but the Academy blinked, recalculated and gave the honor instead to Emil Jannings. Not that the public would have necessarily protested an Oscar for Rin Tin Tin. “He is a human dog,” one fan wrote to his trainer, “human in the real big sense of the word.” As for Jannings and his colleagues, there may have been some doubt. A few years earlier, Movie magazine ran a feature asking “Are Actors People?”