Godfather, Chinatown, Avatar, Toy Story, Michael Clayton… I mean, these are films I like and consider artistic in their own way.
But Best Picture isn’t about art. All the other awards are about art. Best Picture is about the production. It’s about the business of the movie. And that’s why the BP award goes, not to the artists, but to the people who threw the thing together.
If Best Picture were about art, who would you give the award to, if not the producer?
I don’t know. Uh… everyone on the credits before they become a wall o’ text featuring CGI and sound guys?
Anyway, gotta step away from the computer for the next few hours (have a date, y’all!) Don’t overwhelm my ass with responses! 
Every year Entertainment Weekly does a feature where they interview several voting members of the Academy. They always get in front and behind camera members. It’s anonymous and each are able to give their true feelings as to why they voted a particular way. I have never seen anyone say they use the criteria you say they do. They vote for the picture they thought was best on the screen not how the producer did their job. If it was only a bunch of producers voting you might have been correct. But that’s not who is voting.
Well, yes. These are professionals who know how to play the game. They’re never going to say “I voted for 12 years a slave because I really like Brad Pitt and want to work with him someday. And he was really nice that one time we hooked up.”. 
And EW isn’t going to publish anything like that anyway - their job is to sell the magic and mystery of the Academy Awards, not strip away the veneer.
Me? I went through the effort to find out what mattered. And politics, and money, matter most for BP. I don’t know what to say.
You have to hand the statue to someone, don’t you? The producer is the project manager, the boss, the supreme authority (in theory), the movie’s “owner”. Why not give it to them?
I don’t remember having had this argument with you before. You may be thinking of someone else. But anyway, a few points …
The box office correlation with Best Picture that you claim, is in fact far from clear. Many of the winners were far from #1.
Even if there were a clear correlation, we have the vexing problem of correlation vs causation – i.e.- well-crafted films deserving of recognition on artistic merit will have dramatic and emotional impact that tends draw moviegoers to theaters.
Your thesis doesn’t explain why whatever weak correlation may exist between box office success and Oscar success totally goes to hell after 2008.
Still, this friendly disagreement doesn’t prevent me from wishing belly-rubs and skritches to Luna! 
Wow, there certainly seems to be an inflection point around the year 1995. From then to 2017 there were only 3 winners in the top ten box office.
It seems that historically it has been about the business of movies, but in the last 25 years they have shifted BP to an artistic merit award rather than a business award. It could be, frankly, that the big money productions are perceived as light on artistic merit these days, while a half century ago you’d have more artistically worthy productions doing strong business at the box office.
It could very well be the influence of home theater, where people would take the really nice personal drama and decide to watch it at home because it doesn’t have the big explosions and action scenes that are so much fun on the big screen. You couldn’t do that with Kramer vs Kramer, if you didn’t catch it on the big screen, you weren’t watching the thing pretty much ever.
Zero game playing. Did you miss where I said it was anonymous? They are always very frank about why they vote the way they do and it’s not always flattering. But it’s never “Because Joe made that really good deal with Netflix.” Most of the voters are some form of artist. Why would you think they vote for the best business model?
The big inflection came in 2008.
I didn’t put this column in the above list, but I ranked the BP nominees themselves by BO within the BP category and the BP winner was always a top 3 movie in this manner… until the above year. Since then, with the greater distribution of films via streaming, sending out screeners on DVD, ‘artistic merit’ has… seemingly… been a greater concern. However, you can still get a better idea of who will win BP by looking at the business of the nominees as well as the current (or then) reputation of the producers than you can just by picking the “best” movie by “artistry”.
No movie ranked last in BO among their years BP nominees has ever won BP. That correlation has remained true up to now.
If Best Picture was voted on strictly on business grounds then there wouldn’t be a correlation between it and the artistic categories. But there is.
Guys and gals, I don’t know what to say that I haven’t been saying since 2014…
Or 2007 for that matter:
I once used my charts to do very well in Oscar pools because the same correlations in BP also impacted the other races - effectively, the more people saw a movie, the more likely it would win the award in that category. BO wasn’t the determing factor, but it allowed me to automatically strike films from the list of potential winners which improved my odds. Have no idea who is going to win cinematography? It definitely won’t be the movie in that category that the fewest people watched, that’s for sure. The rest might be artistic merit or ‘we owe this person’ or whatever, but it won’t be the film that no one saw.
And the correlations still matter, but nowhere near as much as they did prior to 2008 - prior to that point BO was the primary indicator of which movies were seen. Since then, the numbers are increasingly murky. And I have… and had, as that 2014 post shows… no problem admitting this as well.
I see some correlations, but I don’t see any causation.
The causation, if there is one, is that people vote for movies they have seen. Since it’s far easier to see a movie now than it was even in 1997, I’m sure this still holds.
However, the use of box office itself as a measure of this is increasingly useless. Hell, I stopped keeping this list up because of the lowering correlations. But it still remains a valuable document to at least disprove the myth that popular movies rarely won Best Picture. They did all the time, almost every year!
For this year, my gut tells me All Quiet. It has all the elements of a classic BP winner, hell, it won before in another incarnation. Netflix has grown pretty good at playing the Oscar game, this films rather late resurgence is a testament to that - very few were predicting it back in December or putting it on their favorite lists. So it’s currently #1 on my prediction list.
In some ways, it feels like CODA all over again.
My big concern is the lack of a B. Director nom for Quiet… but, again: CODA. Also, Green Book. This may not be much of a concern any longer, another correlation which is taking a hit.
Everyone is predicting EEAAO, but I’m not too sure. It may be a little too weird for the overall voters. I will say, if it wins, pretty much any “the academy won’t vote for this type of movie” argument pretty much goes out the window when applied to popular genre material. Except slasher flicks. The day a slasher flick wins B Picture is the day I stop paying attention to this stuff.
My current dark horse is Elvis. I think he’s going to win for B Actor and there might be a “let’s give Baz an Oscar” sentiment building.
The Fabelmans has a slight, best described as a “non-zero” chance of winning, but I think it’s momentum has stalled on the basis of weak box office. I, myself, think it was a truly astonishing film in its emotional honesty and worthy of the inclusion. Of all the films on the list, it is the one I would like to see win the most.
Love Tar. Just watched it again on Peacock, a movie made for pretentious people about pretentious people and I just eat that shit right up. However, definitely too niche and I think that the mass of voters are going to settle on Cate winning Best Actress and look elsewhere for B Picture.
It’s gonna be a rough night for Banshees I fear. Colin has the best shot, but I think just too many more people have seen Elvis than Banshees. The Original Screenplay will be interesting - it has a chance (talky movies do), but if it loses to EEAAO, watch out - it may be an early precursor to a runaway train (EEAAO) knocking away all comers.
Director is pretty murky - right now I’d give it to EEAAO, but Spielberg may get the “better give him one more before, well, you know…” vote. If The Fabelmans were more of a crowd pleaser, this would be his category to lose, but that didn’t happen. Tar’s Todd Field is another interesting choice - the man has made just three films (In the Bedroom 2001, Little Children 2006), but those films have 14 total nominations. But right now I’ll say that Kwan and Sheinert have the best odds.
So… as of this moment, my picks are:
BP: All Quiet
BD: Kwan and Sheinert
B Actress: Blanchett
B Actor: Austin Butler
B Original Screenplay: EEAAO.
B Adapted Screenplay: All Quiet
Lol. So you write a ton about how the BP Oscar is just business related and always goes to the film most people have seen and then you predict the winner will be a foreign language Netflix film?
“The Best Picture always goes to the film that makes a lot of money. Except when it doesn’t.”
Oh yeah, that’s useful info.
A slasher flick has already won, for 1991. A REALLY GOOD slasher flick, but a slasher flick nonetheless.
I was preparing a long rebuttal with facts and figures and insightful analysis, when it struck me…
What we have here fits the definition of a Conspiracy Theory. And the one thing I know, is you can’t reason someone out of one.
It starts with unsubstantiated assumptions, moves on the convoluted explanations (sans factual cites) for any anomalies, and then provides the wrapper of requiring that a vast number of publicly known people never reveal this, even anonymously. So, what does this make it? Anyone? Bueller?
The long and short of it is that the awards started out as a publicity event cooked up by the major studios, developed a shroud of integrity as the public started regarding them as serious awards, and that integrity actually took over as the old studio system collapsed.
The fact is the Academy Awards are a recognition by the industry and they are biased at the same time, but biased by the biases of the voters as their industry and their jobs changes with the rise of elements like globalization, television, home entertainment, DVDs, streaming, etc. “Little” pictures win more now because there is more opportunity for a voter to see a good quality version at their convenience (the Oscars share a trait with coach’s polls in sports, in that hey are voted on by successful professionals who don’t have the time to see all the candidates).
Are those box office totals limited to the take before the film was nominated for or won the award? If not, they might not be an indicator of anything other than the promotional value of the awards.
I think it’s been possible for the voters to easily see the nominees for a while, since they’ve been sent DVDs for a couple of decades. (I think now they can see the movies via a secure streaming service.)