Well that’s more a result of what people are spending money on tending to be crap or Marvel superhero movies. 20 years ago the highest grossing films of the year and the Academy Awards had a lot of overlap. Then Marvel came along and changed that.
For seldom-seen photos from history, including the West, you might give shorpy.com a look.
I was scrolling through Cafe Society and misread the thread title as “Sith Academy Awards Nominees”… 
Whew.
I’m also trying not to thread-crap.
There is literally no reply I can have that won’t be threadcrapping. So I’ll stop.
If it wasn’t for the pandemic and same day streaming, I bet Dune, King Richard (both had same day streaming on HBOMax), and West Side Story (which came out right as Omicron was a thing) would have had a lot more theater goers. Dune, though, even with HBOMax streaming came in 13th in 2021 box office.
and to follow up, I looked at the last Academy Awards that counted films that came out pre-pandemic. That’s the 92nd Academy Awards, which looked at 2019 released films. I consider anything that grossed more than $100mil domestically can be considered “what [actual] people watch and spend money on”. I hope we can agree with that.
On that measure the Best Picture nominees which made over $100mil domestically included Joker (9th highest grossing film that year), Ford v. Ferrari, Little Women, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. So 5 of the 10.
And two of the others (The Irishman & Marriage Story) were Netflix films which Netflix released in theaters for a weekend just to get on the ballot, and were likely seen by quite a bunch of people (but who knows how many).
Thanks @ISiddiqui .
I started this thread to get a discussion going on the Oscars for 2021. If someone doesn’t think a film or performance should be on the list of nominees for a specific reason, that’s good fodder for the discussion. If they think there’s a film or performance missing from the nominees, that’s a good thing to discuss (For example, I personally don’t think Spiderman not being nominated for Best Picture is a snub, but if someone thinks it is, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position). Specific opinions, well articulated, are always going to be a positive contribution, whether I or anyone else agrees or disagrees.
But blanket statements declaring everything is crap don’t contribute anything. And broad, sweeping statements without some sort of hard facts or data also don’t make much of a contribution. If you have some criteria or metric that you should be imposed on the awards, let’s hear the facts that back them up. If not, perhaps the contribution would be better in a different thread or forum.
Rachel Zegler, who played the lead role of Maria in the new West Side Story, isn’t invited to the Oscars ceremony, even though the film is up for 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. WTAF?
Even though it wasn’t nominated for Best Original Song (because Disney decided to submit “Dos Orugitas” for consideration from Encanto instead), “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” will be performed live at the Oscars:
Following fan outrage over this fact, Zegler has now been invited not only to see the Oscars, but to be a presenter:
I’d love to hear the real story behind this screw up.
Who should have invited her originally? The producers of West Side Story? The producers of the awards show?
From the article, nominees are invited automatically. Presenters, of course, and probably a short list of VIPs are also automatic invitees. After that, it’s probably a juggling act of who’s hot and who’s not.
From her Wiki page, it looks like this was her first film role, so I’m guessing that whoever made the final list didn’t do their due diligence.
Or maybe this year they went through the invitation list alphabetically. 
This isn’t a threadshit, it’s on topic.
What’s interesting is WHY this happened. Generally speaking in the past, of the 5 nominated films, at least 2-3 were box office hits and it was very, very rare for a genuinely obscure picture to be nominated. It was normal for big crowd pleasing hits to be nominated; “Jaws,” “The Towering Inferno,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” those were all up for Best Picture.
It seems to me this started changing in the 90s as “independent” films began really pushing to get nominations, and that effect has become pronounced as actual box office hits have become extremely likely to not be original works but franchise content.
I’d note that all of the films you listed were originals (even if some were book adaptations), whereas the top nine box office films in 2021 were from franchises, 10 and 11 aren’t going to get nominated, and 12 was nominated even though it’s a Part One…and so on. There’s a lot more homogeneity at the top of the box office charts than there used to be.
Would Titanic or Return of the King win today? I kind of think they might, but I also think that Avengers: Endgame probably deserved at least a nomination.
I don’t think Spider-man: No Way Home deserved a nomination, but I would have considered Shang-Chi or Mitchells Vs. Machines in the main Best Picture Category.
I have seen all but one of the Best Animated Movie category and if Mitchells doesn’t win, it’s a huge ripoff. None of the others are really all that great.
Yes, I think the domination of the box office by franchises prevents the tippy top grossing films from making the Best Picture lists. However, at least a few films in the Top 20 grossing films released in a year make the list:
In 2015 you had The Martian and the Revenant.
In 2016 you had Hidden Figures and La La Land
In 2017 you had Dunkirk and Get Out
In 2018 you had Black Panther (#1 grossing film released in 2018), Bohemian Rhapsody, and A Star is Born
In 2019 you had Joker and 1917
2020 had no one in the Top 20, but that, as you can imagine was a strange year (with two of the most well known movies nominated had a lot of streaming viewers - Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max same day streaming and Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix).
In 2021 you have Dune, but that’s also a strange year.
And now you have to account for streaming movies (I wonder how much box office King Richard would have gotten if it wasn’t released same day on HBO Max - and Dune would likely be far higher up the list for the same reason)
Bear in mind though that these are out of 8-10 nominated films. It used to be pretty common for some or even most of FIVE nominated films to be big box office successes, and of course most of the films you mentioned were not franchise content. There is definitely a much greater split now between what the Oscars likes and what fans are paying to see.
Your point about streaming viewers, though, is a wrench in the works I hadn’t thought about.
That raises an interesting question that might clarify.
If The Godfather was released (new, since it actually is being re-released in 2022) now, in the current theater/streaming environment, would it be worthy of an Oscar nomination, based on the “must be crowd pleasing as measured by box office” criteria? Or would it be a movie that exists only for “the ART of it” and therefore unworthy?