Stillorgan Park Hotel Sponsors UCD Mens Hockey Team

We are delighted to annouce that the Stillorgan Park Hotel are the Offical 2011 Sponsor of the UCD Mens Hockey Team. The team has a great mix of players from all over Ireland & has improved consistently, season after season.

The Stillorgan Park Hotel would like to wish the UCD Mens Hockey Team the best of luck in 2011 and look forward to them winning the league this year!!

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And the Oscar Goes To...

This year we are adding some glitz & glamour to our Christmas Party Night’s. The theme is “A Night at the Oscar’s” featuring entertainment from Motown Big Band “The Jewelettes”. To co-incide with the theme of our Christmas Parties here is a little history about the most anticipated film industry event each year...

Each January, the entertainment community and film fans around the world turn their attention to the Academy Awards. Interest and anticipation builds to a fevered pitch leading up to the Oscar telecast in February, when hundreds of millions of movie lovers tune in to watch the glamorous ceremony and learn who will receive the highest honors in filmmaking.

The Oscars reward the previous year’s greatest cinema achievements as determined by some of the world’s most accomplished motion picture artists and professionals. The Academy’s roughly 6,000 members vote for the Oscars using secret ballots, which are tabulated by the international auditing firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The auditors maintain absolute secrecy until the moment the show’s presenters open the envelopes and reveal the winners on live television.

Far from the eagerly anticipated and globally televised event it is today, the first Academy Awards ceremony took place out of the public eye during an Academy banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Two hundred seventy people attended the May 16, 1929 dinner in the hotel’s Blossom Room; guest tickets cost $5. It was a long affair filled with speeches, but Academy President Douglas Fairbanks made quick work of handing out the statuettes.

There was little suspense when the awards were presented that night: the recipients had already been announced three months earlier. That all changed the following year, however, when the Academy decided to keep the results secret until the ceremony but gave a list in advance to newspapers for publication at 11 p.m. on the night of the Awards. This policy continued until 1940 when, much to the Academy’s consternation, the Los Angeles Times broke the embargo and published the names of the winners in its evening edition – which was readily available to guests arriving for the ceremony. That prompted the Academy in 1941 to adopt the sealed-envelope system still in use today.

Fifteen statuettes were awarded at the first ceremony for cinematic achievements in 1927 and 1928. The first Best Actor winner was acclaimed German tragedian Emil Jannings, who had to return to Europe before the ceremony. The Academy granted his request to receive the trophy early, making his statuette the very first Academy Award ever presented.

The first presentation was the only one to escape a media audience; by the second year, enthusiasm for the Awards was such that a Los Angeles radio station produced a live one-hour broadcast of the event. The ceremony has been broadcast ever since.

The Academy continued to hand out the awards at banquets – held at the Ambassador and Biltmore hotels – until 1942, when increased attendance made these dinner ceremonies impractical. Starting with the 16th Oscar ceremony, which was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the event has always been held at a theater.

In 1953, the first televised Oscar ceremony enabled millions throughout the United States and Canada to watch the proceedings. Broadcasting in color began in 1966, affording home viewers a chance to fully experience the dazzling allure of the event. Since 1969, the Oscar show has been broadcast internationally, now reaching movie fans in over 200 countries.

Click here for more information on our Christmas Party Nights 2010

21 Interesting Facts you may not know...

1. In Disney's "Fantasia", the Sorcerer's name is "Yensid" (Disney backwards) & Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to the famous Disney logo.

2. 2 billion videos are watched per day on YouTube. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, or about 200,000 videos per day. It will take a person more than 400 years to watch all the videos on YouTube.

3. If you stop getting thirsty, you need to drink more water. For when a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.

4. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

5. The Titanic was the first ship to use the SOS signal.

6. The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing.

7. The average person who stops smoking requires one hour less sleep a night.

8. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.

9. Dalmatians are born without spots.

10. The ‘v’ in the name of a court case does not stand for ‘versus’, but for ‘and’ (in civil proceedings) or ‘against’ (in criminal proceedings).

11. Men’s shirts have the buttons on the right, but women’s shirts have the buttons on the left.

12. Every time you sneeze some of your brain cells die.

13. Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.

14. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle was built in 1903, and used a tomato can for a carburetor.

15. The lion that roars in the MGM logo is named Volney.

16. Google is actually the common name for a number with a million zeros.

17. It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it.

18. There are 1,792 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

19. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.

20. The average person laughs 13 times a day.

21. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

If you know any other interesting facts your would like to share, add a comment and let us know!