I couldn’t disagree with you more.
Best Picture should be just that, the best overall picture of the movie season. This includes acting, directing, writing, feel, tone, audience reaction…I think it has nothing to do with “business”.
I can see why you’d think this because the producers are the ones who (usually) accept and keep the Oscar, but if it’s not an artistic award and it’s about business then why doesn’t the box office gross movie win every year?
Whatever year *Driving Miss Daisy *won Best Picture (1989?), the Oscar should have gone to Glory. I STILL get all het up about that whenever I think of it.
Goodfellas. Because it’s an unquestioned masterpiece, one of the greatest movies ever made, and Dances with Wolves was the most boring three hours of my entire life, and I once spent 3 hours literally staring at a blank wall. And the other three movies nominated that year were a fucking joke (Awakenings, Ghost, and Godfather Part III).
Glory wasn’t even nominated.
Wait, Saving Private Ryan didn’t win? It’s so overshadowed all the other movies from its year that that’s a complete surprise to me.
The biggest injustice in the Oscars, though, is the existence of the Best Animated category. It’s a ghetto. The implication is that an animated movie is inherently incapable of competing with live action, and that an animation can therefore never even make it on the nomination list for Best Picture.
Even within what actually gets nominated, of course, that’s not true: Avatar, for instance, was nominated for Best Picture, despite being animated. But the Academy pretends that it wasn’t.
Wow, Ghost and Godfather Part III have to be two of the worst movies ever nominated. :smack:
Especially Ghost. :smack::smack:
The Dark Knight
The complete injustice of that year was that it wasn’t nominated. And here we are, six years later, and it still has a bigger hold on the critical consensus than any of the movies that were nominated (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon).
I suppose being the impetus for the move to 10 nominees is consolation enough.
Because the award is just not for financial success, but a mixture of financial and artistic success.
At least it was this way until 2008. Once the nominees were expanded to 10, the trend has gone to movies which are more artistically successful than financially successful. However, you still cannot exclude financial success from the equation.
Here is an Excel spreadsheet I created showing the relative BO rankings of all B. Picture nominees since 1980 (first run releases only.) Tab three has a number of charts, which the most telling is “Best Picture Winner ranking within BP category, by year.” A number of trends can be gained from this data:
). These films were nominated but did not win.Again, these are first run BO tallies and do not include BO earnings made after the first run… so the box office effect for a film that gets re-released due to being nominated/having won is not shown. For example, Titanic was re-released in 3d but those grosses are not shown. However, I did not adjust if the film’s first release went into Oscar season (like Titanic).
Regardless, financial success matters greatly in determining who wins Best Picture and may be the single most important factor after “the general mood of the voters” (i.e., “we’re not going to give it to Star Wars because it’s a kiddie film and we need to give it to Woody Allen” or “We’re not going to give it to LOTR:FOTR because we need to see how the entire trilogy plays out” or “we need to give it to The Departed because it’s a bit of an embarrassment that Scorcese hasn’t won one of these”.) The data proves it.
Wouldn’t the simplest explanation be that these films are more popular among the voters and are likely to get more votes?
Also, the Academy lists only a single criteria for awarding Best Picture, it has to be the “Best motion picture of the year.” There’s no rules related to producing work or how difficult the production was to pull off. Academy voters are simply told to vote for the “Best motion picture of the year.”
http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/87/pdf/87aa_rules.pdf
1983: Terms of Endearment beats out The Big Chill. For the love of Og, why? An overly mushy melodramatic soap opera of a movie. Even if you love Jack Nicholson’s performance (and he did deserve that Oscar)… seriously, it’s a movie you see once, put it back in its case on the shelf and never crack it open again.
The Big Chill, I still watch at least once a year.
You’re getting me all het up again …
I love Goodfellas. It is a masterpiece and it should have won. The Academy should be embarrassed for their choice. Goodfellas is shown quite regularly and I don’t remember the last time DwW was shown or talked about.
Best Picture winners tend to do well at the box office. But is that because the Academy voters consider the box office as one of their criteria, or because both Academy voters and ticket-buyers both like good movies?
The last time DwW was talked about was when people disparaged Avatar by saying it was too similar to it.
Which doesn’t exactly refute my point. But it does stand that the more people that actually see a film gives that film a greater chance of winning an award than one that has fewer people see it. And that’s likely the difference between post-2008 nominees and pre-2008: with the advent of streaming and a better distribution system for the smaller films, more people are aware of them than would be in, say, 1972.
And you’re correct - there is nothing guiding the B. Picture winner to be anything other than one of the films nominated (other than rules stipulating which films qualify, which apply to all categories).
But the correlation is too strong to be anything but coincidence. Like I noted, the most financially successful movie of the year has won B. Picture 26% of the time since the award has been given. But despite the data, many still argue that financial success has no bearing on a films chances… and that just isn’t so.
I think I can, with a small amount of digging, point out plenty of comments from fellow Dopers that say “Quality doesn’t correlate with popularity” and vice-versa. 
Again, it’s likely the eyeballs effect… but that can’t merely be the sole reason because the correlation is too strong. A little under 1/3rd of the winners from 1980-2013 have been among the top-5 movies of the year and 1/2 were among the top-10 movies.
Anyway, I don’t want to divert the thread from the OP’s purpose. We can talk about this next Oscar season, like I’ve done for the past two or three years.
Well, the first half hour overshadowed other films… but then the rest of the movie was almost boilerplate WW2 film. I still think Shakespeare in Love was not only a better movie for that year, but one of the best movies of the 1990s.
I really hope that you had that sitting already, and that you didn’t create that whole big thing just to prove my igorant and opinionated ass wrong :eek:
That being said, you didn’t really address my point very much. I wasn’t saying that the BP should be more than just “a good movie that was popular” (which is basically what your data is saying). Best picture should be awarded to the picture that is made in the best manner possible, and while box office total should be a factor, I think it should be WAY down the list.
I say (and I’m in a way minority on this) that Forrest Gump is the most well-made movie I have ever seen (so far). Acting, directing, writing, cinematography…everything. I feel that maybe Tom Hanks wasn’t the BEST actor of the movie run, maybe Zemeckis wasn’t the BEST director of that year, but the quality of actor that Hanks was, and the quality Zemeckis was, equals what should have been the best picture.
I totally agree. If you cut off the first 20 minutes of SPR, the remaining movie is trite garbage. If it deserved any award, it should have gotten Best Short Film for those first 20 minutes.
My nominee for switching would be 1970, when Patton won over both MASH and Five Easy Pieces. The only thing Patton is remembered for these days is the opening speech, whereas both of the other films have become part of our cultural consciousness.
Actually, Wiki is the wrong resource. For the Academy, the 1995 Oscars means celebrating the films of 1995. That the ceremony occurs early in the next calendar year is both irrelevant and misleading.
All the major books about Oscar history follow this as well.