They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don’t They?
Box Office and the Oscars: Does The Public Matter?
By J. Don Birnam
February 4, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But this is, after all, a box office site. So American Sniper’s success at the box office and probable defeat on February 22nd raises another question: what is the correlation between box office success and Academy Award success? I don’t mean the reverse question: we all know that Oscar nominations and wins lead to increased box office totals. Although the amount of that bump has been declining (and is certainly worth well under the amount of money invested in the Oscar campaigns), it has still translated into increased rentals and DVD sales.
Here, the focus is on the reverse effect: does box office success translate into Oscar glory? We know anecdotally when Avatar became the highest-grossing movie of all time and lost Best Picture to The Hurt Locker, the lowest grossing winner since the Last Emperor, that the answer is no. But let’s quantify it a bit, shall we?
This isn’t an exact scientific study, and many measures can be used to prove (and maybe disprove?) the point. Today, I’m going to focus on a small set of (arbitrarily selected) numbers, to see what results yield. I will look at yearly box office rank of the Best Picture winner, the average rank of the nominees, and the number of nominees that cracked the top ten highest grossing movies of the year.
The analysis is hindered a bit by the fact that most box office data is incomplete before 1980, and it was really in the 1970s when film historians say there was a very close correlation between Oscar and box office. Thus, the change in the correlation, if any is discovered, may seem smaller when we move only from the 1980s until today. Nevertheless, here is what I found.
*In these years, if the odd-ball nominee that ranked below the top 50 is removed, the average ranking movies up to 5.4, 6.5, 15.6, 12.5, 13.5, and 22 respectively.
^In these years, the expanded Best Picture list meant more chances to get movies in the top 10—but it didn't seem to do much for a while.
These numbers don’t lie, friends. Here are some averages.
So the trends should be obvious. In the 1980s and even the 1990s, the Best Picture winner could be, on average, expected to be among the top 10. And the Best Picture nominees were altogether even among the top 25 or 30, even when accounting for nominees that skew the numbers way down - of which there was inevitably one or two every year. Essentially, the public and the Academy had similar tastes, except for one artsy movie here or there.
This situation was basically flipped in the 2000s and even more so since The Return of the King. The Academy maybe shared one movie with the public, but the rest were out of touch. Thus, in the 2000s, you can see that the Best picture winner, on average, did not even crack the top 25, and the nominees barely cracked the top 50. When you look at after 2003, the numbers are even starker, with the average Best Picture winner ranking at 42.9. And while in the 1980s and 1990s you could expect to see about one and a half Best Picture nominees in the top 10 highest grossing movies of the year each year, in the 2000s the number didn’t even crack one. Again, that number is made even starker post 2003, where, despite the Best Picture expansion in 2009 to give the Academy a chance to nominate popular films, the number still dropped to 0.6.
And here is another stat: in the 1970s, a Best Picture nominee took the box office crown in six out of 10 years. This happened three times in the 1980s and three in the 1990s, but only once in the 2000s before the expansion.
But the year 2003 really is the watershed moment here - after this point, you see no Best Picture nominees in the top 10 until something gave and the Academy expanded the field to more than five nominees in an effort to correct the Dark Knight/WALL-E snubs. But, in 2011, when they returned to only having to nominate five movies each, they returned to old habits, and only Gravity has cracked the top 10 since (American Sniper will surely do the same).
More important for our purposes is something not reflected in this chart: if you look closely, the Best Picture winner tended to be either the highest or second highest grossing of the nominees from 1980 through 2003. Now, the Best Picture winner is frequently not even in the top three of the nominees. To give some examples: Argo was fourth, 12 Years a Slave fifth, The Artist seventh, and The Hurt Locker eighth.
And it just didn’t happen at all - except for one single time - between 1980 and 2003, that they would award a movie outside of the top 20. Since 2004, it has happened all but three times.
So, no matter what way you slice it, a trend is clear. The Academy seemed to care about what the public wanted - why else would so many of their nominees be popular movies? Why else would they award Best Picture only to a movie in the top 20, and normally to one of the two highest nominees amongst their choices? The Academy respected the public’s tastes, and they wanted the public to care about theirs.
Since 2004, that simply stopped happening. Avatar vs. Hurt Locker is the quintessential example but year after year, the most popular of the already unpopular movies has gone away empty-handed. Popularity with the masses didn’t help Gravity or The Help or Lincoln or Toy Story 3. The disconnect is complete.
All of this is to say that the notion that American Sniper could steal Best Picture from any of the other nominees simply because the American public has responded well to it ignores the unmistakable trend of the last 10 years. The public does not care about the Academy’s choices, but more important, the Academy doesn’t care about the public’s. They have tried hard to incorporate the public’s choices - rule changes, date changes, etc. - but nothing has worked. Frankly, I don’t see this changing in the near future, not while the public flocks to action and effect-driven movies, which they clearly do not like. This is mostly a problem for the Academy and its relevance, but that of course is beyond the scope of this article.