There seems to be a consensus that the Oscars are becoming less and less populist. Back in the day, movies like Star Wars, Tootsie, Ghost, and E.T. were all nominated for Best Picture. This year, a lot of people haven’t seen a single one of the nominees. The Oscars have gone all snooty on us. But here’s my question: can “snooty” be quantified? Can we graph the Academy’s turn towards art house?
(NOTE: This post would not be possible without the badassery of sheely, whose day job involves all sorts of numerical kung fu.)
The most obvious way to measure popularity is by looking at domestic box office. So I went to Box Office Mojo and found the grosses of all the Best Picture winners back to 1980 (the earliest year available). I adjusted the numbers for inflation using this calculator and plotted the results. (NOTE: The most recent year the inflation calculator could handle was 2007, so I’m using 2007 dollars. But don’t worry – my spreadsheet will be available for download at the end, so you Excel junkies out there will have something to do in your free time.)
The four big spikes are Return of the King, Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Terms of Endearment. Yeah, that last one surprised me too, but it turns out that adjusted for inflation, the Shirley MacLaine weepy outgrossed Gump. It’s hard to a see trendline, but the 2005 and 2007 winners (Crash and No Country) are the two lowest on the chart. In fact, Crash is the lowest grossing Best Picture winner ever (accounting for inflation, of course).
Now, let’s take all the BP nominees and find the average gross for each year.
Okay, this chart is definitely less spikey than the one of just the winners. The two big peaks here are E.T. and Titanic (again). (Speaking of E.T., I’m using only the grosses from these movies’ original theatrical releases.) But if you ignore those peaks, you can see the Oscars trending steadily upwards for 20 years, then crashing in ’04 and ’05, and then (maybe) starting to climb again. However, total Hollywood grosses also trended upwards over the past 20 years, so it’s possible that higher grosses over this time period just reflects something that was going on industrywide, not an Oscar thing specifically.
But maybe graphing the money is a mistake. Titanic made almost twice what Forrest Gump did, but does that mean the Oscars were twice as populist the year Titanic won? Both Titanic and Gump were the number one movies of their years, so maybe we need a system that rates those two films as equally popular.
What we want is a metric that shows how a movie grossed not in dollars, but in comparison to the other releases that year. To do that, we’re going to look at the RANKS of nominees. For example, in 2007, No Country For Old Men won, and Box Office Mojo says it was the 36th highest-grossing movie of the year. Box Office Mojo also says that there were 631 total releases that year. That means that No Country outgrossed 94.3% of 2007 releases. The formula I’m using is:
Popularity = 100 * (1 – (Rank of the Film in Question / Number of Movies Released))
Do this for every year, and you get:
On the one hand, Crash was really freaking unpopular. On the other hand, it was still more popular than 91% of films that year. So when we talk about the Academy honoring less mainstream movies, it’s important to remember that these movies are all pretty damn mainstream.
Now let’s average all five nominees using our new formula. (NOTE: Box Office Mojo didn’t have the total number of releases for ’80 and ’81, so I got them from Wayne Schmidt’s page.)
One surprising result jumps out at me: 2007 looks a lot stronger when you graph it this way than when you graph it the other way. Here are the two charts, superimposed.
Here’s what I think is going on. The size of the gap between the red line and the green line tells us how evenly distributed the popularity was between the five nominees. For instance, in 2006, The Departed grossed more than double any other BP nominee. But in 2007, no nominee ranked lower than 66th. So even though both years had similar box office totals, 2007 had a much more popular group of movies overall.
It seems likely, however, that 2008 will rank pretty low, whether you’re looking at gross or our nifty little popularity formula. So it seems like the conventional wisdom is right: the Oscars are getting snooty.
Maybe.
But there’s another possibility–maybe the Academy’s been consistent in rewarding quality work, but the public is becoming less and less willing to see it. The rise of VHS, DVD, and HDTV has definitely changed our viewing habits, skewing the box office towards blockbusters and other event pictures. With tickets pushing $13 in some places, people are going to the movies less, and they’re more likely to catch the smaller, indie films on video. So maybe when we’re looking at these charts, what we’re actually seeing is the moviegoing public gradually becoming less likely to shell out for a ticket unless the film contains explosions.
This woman is like The Dark Knight.
But personally, I do think the Academy has become more highbrow. They could have easily recognized The Dark Knight and/or Wall-E, which were both widely hailed as two of the greatest pieces of pop-art ever. But they went with the exact kind of films you’d expect to be nominated: “Prestige Pictures,” which probably only got greenlit in the first place because the producers thought they sounded like the kind of movies the Academy loves. Popcorn films, no matter how good, need not apply. I’m reminded of last fall’s San Francisco marathon. 24-year-old Arien O’Connell had the fastest women’s time of the day, finishing the race in 2:55:11. But she didn’t win. Arien hadn’t entered in the “elite” group of marathoners, and so she wasn’t eligible for awards, even though she’d crushed the official trophy winner by eleven minutes.
So here’s my question for you readers who have made it this far: why? Not why did you make it this far–why has the Academy been nominating less popular movies? Is it because studios are spending more money campaigning for those nominations? But The Dark Knight and Wall-E had giant ads in Variety too. Do the voters, all Hollywood insiders, have a narcisstic impulse to see Hollywood as a place where they make Serious Art about Important Things? (“We’re the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular.“) But then how come the trend has emerged only in the past decade?
We’ll discuss it during our special Oscar podcast this Sunday, and we’ll try and mention your theories.
And as promised, here’s the spreadsheet, for those of you who want to crunch the numbers for yourself.