And The Oscar Goes To…

The Oscars are a yearly award show that honors films, actors, actresses, and more from the past year. There is generally some scandal or controversy surrounding the Oscars, but this does not mean that there is not a pattern. We will be analyzing the factors that went into making these Oscar winners and nominees to see if we can detect these patterns.

Budget and Gross

First, we will look at the costs and how much each movie made.

The graph above charts the budget each nominee and winner had by year. As you can see, a higher budget does not mean a higher chance of winning. This also likely has something to do with Genre, which we will analyze later.

This chart shows the worldwide grossing of all the Best Picture Winning films since 1990. Three films are not featured because they had a total gross much higher than the others (1994’s “Forrest Gump” had a gross of about $680 million, 2003’s “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” had a gross of about $1.1 billion, and 1997’s “Titanic” had a gross of about $2.2 billion). Besides those three films, it appears that a high worldwide gross does not have a ton of impact on winning Best Picture.

Conclusion

There doesn’t seem to be much correlation the winner of Best Picture and the budget and worldwide grossing of the films.

Actors and Actresses in Best Picture Films

The nine actors and actresses graphed here have the most appearances since 1990 as a star or secondary star in a film nominated for Best Picture. Interestingly enough, one of these actors/actresses have been in a Best Picture nominated film in every year besides 2016 since 1990. Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks have the most appearances as star/secondary star at nine. This does not mean their film's have always been successful though, as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ralph Fiennes and Russel Crowe have appeared in the most films that have won Best Picture since 1990 at two wins each. All of these actors and actresses are white, and only two of them are women (Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet). It is also important to note that between Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet's nine total appearances, only they each only had one role where they were the lead (Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth" and Kate Winslet in "The Reader").

This graph shows how gender and race of all the Best Picture winning films' stars have stacked up. Women have only had the starring role in 6 of the winning pictures, all of them being white women. Men have accounted for the other 26 starring roles, 21 of them being white men. The other five roles include one Indian actor (Dev Patel in "Slumdog Millionare"), one Asian actor (Song Kang-ho in "Parasite"), and two Black actors (Mahershala Ali in "Moonlight" and Chiwetel Eliofer in "12 Years a Slave")

This graph shows the gender and race of secondary stars in Best Picture-winning films since 1990. The male and female totals are much closer than the star graph, but both columns are still heavily white actor/actress-dominated. There have been fourteen women as secondary stars and eighteen men. Eleven of these women have been white, one was Indian (Freida Pinto in "Slumdog Millionaire"), and two were black (Naomi Harris in "Moonlight" and Octavia Spencer in "The Shape of Water"). For the men, there have been thirteen white actors, one Hispanic actor (Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men"), one Asian actor (Lee Sun-Kyun in "Parasite"), three Black actors (Anthony Mackie in "The Hurt Locker", Michael Kenneth Williams in "12 Years a Slave", and Mahershala Ali in "The Green Book").

Conclusion

There is an unfortunate but unsurprising conclusion here: Hollywood is dominated by white people and more specifically white men. It should be noted that there have been more winners featuring people of color in more recent years, but while looking at the past 30 or so years of Oscar winners, there is still a very large white presence.

Best Actor and Actress

Now we will look at the award winners for Best Actor and Actress.

This first graph is showing the ages of all the male winners for best actor and which oscar number it was. The color represents where they are from. This is to see if there are any patterns within these winnings. In terms of where they are from there seems to be no pattern at all. As for age, it seems that most winners between 1990-2021 are between the ages of 40-50.

This second graph is similar but it is for the female winners of best actress. Again it is what Oscar number it was, their age, and where they are from. This had a little different result. It seems that not only is there no pattern again in where they are from but there is actually more diversity in location in the female winners than the male winners. In terms of age, once again 50 seems to be the majority cap, but the oldest female is higher than the oldest male. For the males it was 60, for females it was 80. Another difference here is that the majority isn't between 40-50 but between 20-40. Another thing here is that the male winners have a much more diverse group of ages whereas the female winners are not spread out very far.

Conclusion

It looks like the best actor/actress award generally goes to men under 50 and women under 40.

Genre



This is a Network graph of all the Oscar nominees and winners from 1990-2021. The different colors and centers of the spirals are the different genres. All the nodes are the movies. From this, we can see that the genre that is most present at the Oscars is Drama. This is not too surprising. The second most present genre is Romance. It's interesting to see that the genre that started Hollywood, Western, is one of the smallest categories in the Oscars. 


This graph supports the findings of the Network graph but it also shows which genre has won the award of Best Picture, not just the nominees. To no surprise, Drama is the easy front-runner with Romance in second. It is interesting to note that the third place for most Best Picture wins is the Thriller genre, despite the War genre having more nominations.

Finally, this graph breaks down the genres of the films by year. We can see that there seems to be a wider range of films after 2010, but this could be because the Oscars increased the number of nominees in 2009.

Conclusion

All of the data agree that Drama films are more likely to win and/or be nominated for Best Picture. If we look back at the worldwide gross data, this makes sense. Drama films often do not pull in as much as an Action or Adventure film would, so it is no surprise that the majority of the winners of Best Picture do not have a super high gross.

Final Thoughts

Looking at the data collected, it appears that if you wanted to create a film in the past 30 years with the statistically best chance of being nominated for Best Picture, you would have to need the following things…

  1. A film that would fit into the drama genre.
  2. A white actor to take the lead (preferably Leonardo DiCaprio)
  3. An older man or a younger woman as the secondary star (this will also likely be a white person, but there is a little more flexibility here)

The statistics agree, these three attributes will likely get your film nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps in another thirty years, this data will have a bit more diversity, but for now, it appears that the white drama actors run Hollywood.