Are the Oscars out of touch?

[JohnT]

@the_diego

A box office hit was never relevant for an Oscar win/nomination. People knew that decades ago.

I don’t want to get in this argument again, but I will just quote from a post I made a few years ago about this very point.

… 27% of Best Picture winners (22 films out of 82 awards) were the #1 box office grossing movie of the year upon initial release (caveat: in three of these years (61, 46, 40) the B. Picture winner was overtaken by a Disney film with multiple releases in subsequent years. All my sources combined the release #s for Disney movies.)

… 77% of BP winners were among their years top-10 grossing films. The first Best Picture winner not to be a top-10 film was 1948’s Hamlet, which ranked 17th in box office. The first BP winner not to be a top-20 film was 1987’s The Last Emperor (#25 for the year).

… The average yearly box office rank of BP winners is 8.5. For losers it’s 19.27.

However, since I made this it is becoming clear that the correlation between being B. Picture winner and a box office favorite is becoming a little more tenuous. But, given a list of nominees, smart money says to pay attention to the box office figures of the nominees.